Semper Fi
by TheGeekinPink
Summary: AU: Special Agent Quinn Fabray and the rest of her team struggle with the loss of one of their own, as her killer runs free and threatens their lives. A CIA/Mossad liaison agent Rachel Berry is brought in to convince Quinn not to kill the former agent which causes her to question why Rachel wants him alive? And will she be the key to her catching and killing the rogue informant?
1. Twilight

**14:55pm (2:55 pm)**

The man in black stood patiently in the enclosed space of the old industrial elevator and listened as it slowly creaked on to the top. His free hand lay on top of the hand that held the handle to his long, black, and slightly heavy duffel bag. The look in his crystal light blue eyes were cold and void of any emotion,his lips sat in a straight line as he prepared for the job he was about to complete. He did not register the sounds of the gunshots being fired outside, probably from the shoot out currently occurring between his men and the MCRT agents below. He had a feeling that they were keeping the agents on their toes with the drone, giving him just enough time to set up and prepare the final part of his plan. Whether any of them were captured or killed in the process, was none of his concern and frankly he thought they were on their own. They had served their purpose and he had no use for them anymore. They would die as martyrs for the cause, at least his cause anyway. Everything was panning out better than he imagined and soon his mission would be complete.

As he reached the final stretch of his destination, he ran the fingers of his free hand through his short brown hair, brushing it forward to keep it uniformed and in place. He anxiously looks down at the duffel bag, before staring straight ahead once more. He had to clear his mind of any and all distractions that plagued him and would keep him from completing this assignment. He takes a deep breath and closes his mind wanders first to the two year old little girl who was the spitting image of her mother. She even had her mother's expressive chocolate brown only thing that she got from him was his nose. She was back in New York with his ex and he was sure that she would never see him again. If her mother had her way, he had no doubt that she had already branded him as the devil reincarnated now and even more so when all is said and done ex had ended things for good six months ago and at the time, he thought she was just being overdramatic. They would break up like this all the time and he was sure that they would make up once again, once the CIA operative cooled off. He was surprised and shocked to find her gun aimed at his head, as soon as he walked in the door, with her threatening to kill him if he ever came was the last time he saw his family and the last time he had any crazy aspirations for a normal life.

He thought about his father, who he held responsible for the man he is today and hated him for it. Brody felt like he had finally given his father what he's wanted for the last couple of years, a reason to disown him as a was sure his father knew that he became a rogue agent and sold Mossad and the US to the very terrorist agencies they have spent decades fighting against. And for the first time in his life, he didn't care. In his thirty-two years of life, he had been pushed into this role as being a double agent in Hamas for Mossad. His father had worked for them for years before becoming assistant director of Mossad and he expected his son to follow in his foot steps. He played his role as the dutiful son following his father's path for a while,but quickly grew bored of the very same organizations that he was supposed to be spying on for Mossad,compensated him much better for his information than his father did. For the last couple of years, their relationship had been strained at best. The last time he talked to him, he told the assistant director how much he despised and how he couldn't wait for the day that everyone saw him as the monster he truly was for what he did to his mother.

And then there was the person, whom he would always seemed to plague his thoughts. The mother of his child, the only woman that he had ever came close to loving. She loved him, at one time, in spite of his flaws and forgave him for his thoughtless and sometimes reckless was the woman he screwed over the moment he went through her things, the night he after he proposed six months ago, and found the classified documents for the drones that her agency had recovered at the time and sent to his contacts. He'll never forget the last time he saw her. The agent remembered the utter look of betrayal and devastation in her eyes as she presented him with evidence that he was betraying Mossad and the CIA by selling information to Hamas. If he was capable of feeling anything, he would have taken the service weapon she had pointed into his face as she told him to never come back and shot himself with it out of guilt. But because of who he was and how he was trained, he felt nothing at all. He figured that she expected him to feel something that would justify her giving him a second chance. But there was nothing there.

As he exhales out, his mind becomes clear and focuses in on one thing and one thing only, breaking Special Agent Quinn Fabray.

He had done his research on the elusive agent and was able to get a good read on her from the two encounters that he had shared with the woman. The last of said encounters involved a bullet being lodged into his arm, which Quinn excused as helping him out on his assignment. She had been at NCIS for about ten years and served as a Marine sharp shooter for her six year tenure with the core. At twenty-four, she was recruited to NCIS by the now retired special agent William Schuester. She had worked under him for five years before his retirement and Director Terri Schuester had given the young agent a team of her own.

Brody didn't find out much about agent Fabray's family, that he could use against had a mother,who died during her first year at NCIS and her father was living somewhere in a small town in Ohio called as far as he knew, they weren't close, something else the two had in common. Outside of her many disciplinary citations during her time at McKinley High School, nothing else was known about the agent other than that. At least nothing he could use for what he needed to from the brief exchanges he shared with the agent, he knew that she was smarter than she appeared. She was loyal to the ones she loved to a fault and would do anything to protect them. He knew that if anything ever happened to his team, she would stop at nothing to find him. For all intense and purposes, if he and Special Agent Fabray were not fighting on different sides, he would have extended an offer to her to work for him. She is a worthy advisory and her impressive skills would have been a fine asset to his unfortunately for her, his unfortunate competitive streak would not allow him to let her have the advantage over him in the little game they were playing with one another.

The dinging of the elevator broke Brody out of his thoughts as he finally arrived to his destination. He walks out of the elevator and enters a small room littered with stacks and stacks of boxes. The building itself once served as an office that was abandoned years ago. In front of the window stood a lone chair facing forward. Brody maneuvered through the clutter carefully before finally reaching the chair. He kneeled down beside it and opened the duffel bag, pulling out a tripod that was folded into itself. He takes the tripod out and sets it up at an angle out the window, one that pointed to the roof directly across from this building. The next thing that he takes out is a short, black rifle, a Brava fifty-one, and opens it up and loads it before setting it on the stand. He looks out of the scope to get it into the angle he needs it to be in. When he is satisfied with his work, he pulls the chair up to the window and crouches back down into position looking into the scope and waiting for his intended target.

He points the gun down below to the streets and he sees a tall, lanky blond haired man in a black cap with the white lettering NCIS stitched in the front. He had lips that were far too big for his face and he was staring hard at whatever he typing into his he did not know that Agent Fabray's only other sibling was a older sister who lived out in California, he would have assumed that the boy was her younger brother. Briefly recalling his research, he was able to figure out that it was Agent Samuel Evans, the computer specialist and new probationary agent. He had only been there for a few months and was apparently a transfer from NCIS' Norfolk office. Brody watched carefully as the boy ran away from the laptop and take shelter behind a black Acura from the raining barge of bullets. Agent Evan's features relaxed as he assumed that he was safe from what was occurring. But unfortunately for him, he was at a good, but not perfect angle for Brody to get a straight shot off. The bullet would go directly through the back of his head and exit clean through his forehead if all went to plan. So he puts a little pressure on the trigger, preparing to let it go.

But at the last moment, he decides against it. Killing Agent Evans would be too simple for Brody. He had a feeling Agent Fabray would not take his death as hard as she would take a more veteran member of her team. He was just a probationary agent after all and sometimes, things like this happen. And there was nothing more that they could have done for him. Or at least that is the way he thinks Agent Fabray would try to rationalize it. That was just not going to work for Brody. No, he wanted a death that would haunt Agent Fabray for the rest of her life. One that would stay with her wherever she went . One that she would not be able to just rationalize and get over. No, he wanted her to feel the kind of pain that he had been forced to feel his entire life by all the women in his life and his father that he had never been able to recover from. He wanted to send her over the edge, to be damaged and broken beyond repair, just like he was. As he pointed the gun toward the neighboring rooftop and saw Agent McKenzie go down, taking a bullet for Agent Fabray, he knew who his kill would be.

Three agents burst through the door with their semi automatic rifles pointed in the direction that they were facing. Agent Fabray's short, dirty blonde hair that reached just below her shoulder, flew all over into her face. Her rifle pointed straight ahead as she looked around the area. They had been surrounded and she knew that Brody's men could be hiding anywhere,so they had to stay on their toes.

She had told Santana to cover Sam while he figured out a way to deactivate the drone while she, Puck and Dani went to find Brody and the rest of his men. She had been waiting for the Mossad agent to screw up, so that she could personally escort the smug son of a bitch to Gitmo. For weeks, she had kept a close eye on him and which seemed to finally paid off. Before they got to the roof, she and her team had managed to take out three of his six cronies on their way to the rooftop, where she expected him to wasn't as concerned with catching Brody's men. Her main objective was to disarm the drone that Brody had set up and stop it from crashing into a naval ship that was set to for someone that enjoyed chaos as much as Brody seemed to, she was surprised that he wasn't here firing off a few rounds of his own.

As the Agents get onto the rooftop, they see a man in an orange vest with a black brief case, apparently controlling the drone's flight. Inside the briefcase there is a monitor with a clear view of the naval marina and the large ship that the drone was about to crash into. Quinn immediately shot and killed the pilot and watched as his body falls to the ground. She and Puck, whose unruly mohawk stuck to parts of his face from his sweat, held his gun in position, walked slowly up to the device.

"Clear" said Agent McKenzie, the tan light green eyed,,raven haired brunette,who was a couple of inches taller than her, was on agent Fabray's right side as she lowered her rifle.

Quinn looked at the monitor and noticed that the drone was still going.

"Evans! This thing is still flying!" she yells through the earpiece.

"Okay, one freq down, two to go." he tells her, even though she can barely hear him. Suddenly, she hears gunshots and rustling noises coming from Sam's frequency. She looks down and turns her head to see where they were coming from and sees nothing.

"Boss! One of them shot through my transmitter!" Sam says frantcially. She stands up and continues to look at the monitor as Puck turns to her.

"You know how to fly one these things?" he asks skeptically.

Quinn looks at him and takes a couple of steps back away from the monitor and aims her gun at the screen.

"No, but I know how to crash it." she replies, cryptically.

She fires off a couple of rounds into the device and watches the metal briefcase as it goes up in flames. She then walks up to the edge and looks down at Sam, who is still crouched down behind the car.

"Evans, you ok?" she asks. She looks down at him and sees that he has his gun pointed towards the ground.

"I got one terrorist in site. I don't know if I got him, but he stopped shooting." he says.

"Hold your position, we'll push." Quinn instructs him. She cocks her gun to find that she has run out of bullets. She turns to Agent McKenzie, knowing that she always carried a couple of extra rounds for herself.

"I'm out."

"Me too" Dani tells her as she cocks the rifle back into place.

Puck walks up to the senior Agent and hands her one of his last rounds. Quinn takes the magazine away from him and loads it into her own gun.

As Quinn is reloading her gun, the banged up silver door of the rooftop opens. A man appears with an automatic pistol aimed at Agent Fabray who was still looking down trying to reload her gun. Dani turns around and sees the shooter, who had the gun aimed at the senior agent and immediately leaps out from where she is standing.

"Shooter!" she screams as she leaps in the way of Agent Fabray, falling into the ground after being shot in her midsection.

Quinn turns around and looks up before firing at the intruder. Puck is couple of feet away, firing off his own rounds. They walk up to the door and fire into the cracks. A few minutes later, the man's body f tumbles out of the door and rolls to the ground. Agent Fabray puts her gun down and runs over

to where the fallen agent lay.

"Dani?" she says gently as kneels down and turns the girl over to remove her gear. Puck comes over and assists in removing her navy blue jacket NCIS jacket to get to her vest. Dani has her eyes closed as Quinn hastily rips off the pocket to the bullet-proof vest to find a gold fragment lodged inside. Agent Fabray looks up and sighs in relief and Agent Puckerman stares down at her, with an eyebrow raised.

"Are you ok?" he asks.

Dani begins to come to. Her eyes open slightly as she looks up at the two relieved agents.

"Ow. I just got shot at point blank range Puckerman, what do you think?" she says sarcastically.

"That you're not going to be going to Pilates class tomorrow?" he bites back with a smirk.

"Ow. Ugh." she says still on the ground not being able to move. Quinn knows that Dani's not going to let her hear the end of this. That she'll probably use this as even more leverage to get Quinn to baby her at home for the next week or so, without complaint from the senior agent. And after everything the team has been through today and in the last few weeks with this assignment, she would gladly indulge and do the bidding of her wife, if she asked.

Quinn and Puck offer Dani their arms and held onto her as she stood up in all her five foot eight glory. Agent McKenzie stumbles forward a bit as Quinn grip her arms in a grip to steady her.

"Protection detail is over." she tells Dani, with a ghost of a smile, knowing that the other agent would be happy about that.

Ever since the situation with Brody escalated, Quinn being as overprotective as she is,insisted that Dani have protection detail with her at all times when she couldn't knew that Brody had his eyes set on her since the hostage situation in the morgue a few months ago. Quinn never told her wife this, but she had been worried that Brody was going to use Dani to get to her Dani had been upset because she knew she could take care of herself and didn't need Quinn to treat her like she couldn't. It had been a source of tension in their household for the last few weeks, but in the end Dani conceded. She still wasn't happy about it, but if it meant Quinn getting a little piece of mind and not having anything else on weighing on her like this case had, then she was fine with it. Now that this was all over Quinn could not wait to get back into her workshop and work on her Lucille, the unfinished boat collecting dust in their basement.

Puck smiled at her and watched as she dusted herself off.

"You did a good job there, McKenzie." he told her proudly.

When she first started at NCIS, Puck gave her a rough time. He thought that Dani was way too prissy to be an field agent there. And her showing up in heels on her first field assignment did nothing to get rid of his doubts. Yeah, he and Dani had their fair share of barbs thrown back and forth at each other. And there was that awkward tension for a while,after he discovered that Dani had been dating the boss even though he had a thing for her. But in the end, there was no one on the squad, besides the boss of course, that he was prouder of being able to work alongside.

"For once, Puckerman is right. You did do a good job today Dani. I'm proud of you." she says softly but with conviction.

Nodding in agreement and allowed herself to smile for the first time in weeks, since Brody popped back into their lives. She spent most of her time worried about Dani, since she was the closest one out of all of them who had even gotten close enough to Brody and living to tell about it. In all honesty, the last few weeks, as they discovered Brody's threat, she had been angry with Dani for hesitating to kill him that. That she could have saved them all the trouble and just killed him when she had the chance in the morgue. She wanted to catch this guy so badly that she did not care that the CIA had specifically told NCIS to back off since he was working for them. Even though they didn't catch them and he was still a target on her radar, Quinn would enjoy their team's victory for now. Everyone was safe and going to be going home tonight, in their own beds for the first time in weeks. And that in itself was something to celebrate.

Dani looks at Quinn, with her big,bright eyes in playful shock, and smiles. In the seven years she had been working there at NCIS and the five years they had been together, not once did Quinn complement her while on the job. She may have told her at home once or twice, but never while they were working. Quinn didn't want the other agents to think that Dani was getting special treatment because of their is why when they first began seeing each other, they had a rule that their professional and personal lives would stay separate at all times. They figured it would keep them both safe and out of harm's way if no one but a select few knew the true nature of their relationship. Even the NCIS director Terri Schuester did not know they had been married for the last four years. Only the people on her team knew and they all promise not to say a word to anyone. She has a sneaky suspicion that Quinn had done something to ensure their silence, but she's pretty sure she does not want to know what that something was. She turns in Quinn's direction and laughs and replies sarcastically.

Meanwhile, Brody looks into the scope of the gun and sees his target Agent McKenzie stand up. The moment had finally arrived as he saw the brunette turn to Agent Fabray to say something. It was a shame he had to do this since he was quite fond of had worked on an undercover assignment together while she was still in CIA and he became smitten with the girl, in spite of his relationship with Rachel. But unlike any of the other girls he was able to woo, she had turned him down politely saying that she was married to her job and a relationship would only get in the way. He'd like to believe that maybe in another life, they would have been good together. That she would have made a good wife for him and given him the normal life he desperately craved to have. That she could have saved him from pushes those thoughts away as he pushes his finger on the trigger and lets go.

"Wow. I thought I'd die before I ever heard a compliment from-"

Before she can finish her sentence, a gunshot rings out into the air and blood splatters all over Agents Fabray and Puckerman as Dani's body suddenly falls to the ground. Quinn and Puck stand rooted in their spots in complete shock. After a few moments,Quinn hesitantly looks over at Puck who

is covered head to toe in her wife's blood. She sympathized with her colleague as she saw the brief look of horror etched on to his him broke her out of her daze and she began frantically looking all over the place desperate to see where the shot came from. She picks up her rifle and fires a couple of rounds into the area, hoping that she could nail the son of a bitch wherever he was hiding. She looks in the direction of the building directly across from the one they were on and for a moment she thought she saw movement in her peripheral vision. For the first time in her life, Quinn ignored her gut feeling and began shooting in the opposite direction that she could have sworn she heard the gunshot come from, hoping that at least one of those bullets would catch Brody Weston and put the bastard out for good. Even if she felt an easy death was more than he deserved.

"Sorry Danielle." Brody says ominously as he cocks the gun and aims it towards Agent Fabray.

For a brief moment, he contemplated ending it right there, kill two birds with one stone. Put poor Agent Fabray out of her figured by the time he was done playing with her head, she would wish for thought better of it though and decided to go for the computer aimed the rifle to the street below. He fires off a couple of rounds into Agent Evan's computer, watching the machine black out and burst into flames, destroying nearly all physical evidence of his involvement.

He springs out of the chair and opens up the duffel bag, stuffing the rifle back into it as quickly as possible. When he's got it secure in the bag, Brody stands up and takes off towards the

elevator. It would only be a matter of time before NCIS figured out that he was here and have the building surrounded. He also didn't want to stick around for the fall out of what he had done. He was not ready to face Quinn's rage just yet. There were still things that he needed to do to get inside of her head before he was ready to kill her. They would have their moment, soon.

As the elevator made it to the ground floor, he turned the corner of the office building and exited through the fire escape entrance. Once he was out of the building he stops in the abandoned alleyway and leans up against the brick wall of the building. He paused for a moment before a satisfied smirk made his way onto his lips. The job was complete and the warm, tingling feeling in his gut returned, the high was back. There was nothing like what he was feeling at this moment and there was no drug that could ever compensate for how good he felt after he killed someone. Not even the birth of his own daughter could replace how alive he felt right now and he doesn't think there ever will. It was the only time Brody had felt something good and he would savor it for now. The infallible Special Agent Quinn

Fabray was finally broken. And soon, she would be dead. He turns out into the sidewalk, whistling Sinatra's My way, putting one of his hands in his pants pocket and the other holding on to the black duffel bag. He would go back to his place and wait for Agent Fabray to make the next move.


	2. Afterglow

**Disclaimer: NCIS and Glee are not mine. They belong to Fox and CBS studios, respectively. I'm just borrowing them for a while.**

* * *

** 21:15 (9:15 pm):**

** Morgue**

Dr. Shelby Corcoran, with her shoulder length chestnut hair, who appeared to be in her mid forties, trudged down the empty hallway of NCIS headquarters heading to autopsy. Her hands were in the pockets of her beat up leather jacket and her brown eyes downcast as she made her way down the quiet hallway, with the soft sounds of her black heels clicking on the floor kept her company. Normally there would be an agent or two that stuck around after hours finishing up paperwork or busy in interrogation, that she would bump into and make idle conversation with,before heading to her lab to prep her patients to be worked on the next day. Tonight though,there was not a soul to be found anywhere in this part of the building.

In her seventeen years at NCIS, Shelby enjoyed every second of her tenure as Chief Medical Examiner. She was eager to walk into her lab every morning, with her chai green tea in hand, ready to interact with the poor soul who ended up on her table, getting to know them better. She probably knew more about them in death than they knew of themselves in life. From an undiagnosed heart condition to what they ate before they the end of the day when everyone had left and she had stitched her patient back in the condition they were in before, she would tell them goodbye like she would to an old friend, before going home for the day.

There was nothing about her job or the people who were unfortunate enough to end up on her table that fazed her. She had seen victims who had been dismembered to the point where she and her assistant Mike had to meticulously put back together before the families could claim them, sometimes unsuccessfully. She had seen bodies that were charred beyond recognition and they would need to use other means to figure out who they were. Throughout the worst of the worst cases Shelby had seen, none of them made her dread doing her job. She enjoyed being their companion and confidant until their families or next of kin came to pick them up. That was all true up until this afternoon, when she received a call from a distraught Noah Puckerman telling her that her next patient would be a dear friend and colleague of theirs.

Today was the first time in her career that she wanted to be anywhere that wasn't the autopsy room. For a moment she wanted to be selfish. To go home and slip on her red silk pajamas, open up a bottle of red wine and spend the night drinking away the sorrow that she felt for Dani and cry. Or at least wake up and realize that this was all a horrible dream and that all of the field agents were happy and healthy, trading quick witted barbs with one another in the bullpen, like they did every day. Before Quinn would reprimand them, mostly Noah, with a firm smack on the back of their heads and a stern get back to work. That everything would go back to the way it's supposed to be.

When she approached the silver double doors of autopsy, Shelby put her fingers around the one door handles and hesitated. Director Schuester had recommended they hire another medical examiner outside the agency to deal with Danielle's autopsy, out of conflict of interest on Shelby's part. She thought for a moment that maybe it wasn't too late to bring that person in and take some personal time off. The medical examiner pushed those thoughts away as she regained her composure and opened the door to the lab.

Shelby reaches over and flips the switch to the green service light, brighting the pitch black room enough to for her to see where she was going from the door. She hangs up her jacket,that was a bit damp from the rain outside, on the coat rack by the door and sets her black umbrella next to it. She walks over to the first silver table, where a lone black body bag awaited her. The medical examiner turns on the lamp above her, brightening up half of the room.

She couldn't helped but feel relieved that the medics who assisted her at the scene had respected her wishes to handle Dani with the utmost of care, as there was no noticeable damage to the bag. Shelby takes the zipper in her hand and as cautiously as possible, unzipped the bag. Dani was in the same condition that the medical examiner had left her with the paramedics. The former agent was paler than her natural bronze complexion and her eyes were closed this time, making things a bit easier for her.

The crimson bullet wound in the middle of her forehead was still there. She notices a dark brown stray hair out of place, taking her finger and brushed it back little putting it back in place. The medical examiner looked down at her fallen friend solemnly, silently cursing Brody for what he had done. The small lump that had formed in her throat had grown larger and she felt unshed tears begin to form in her eyes.

" Oh Danielle, I am so sorry that this happened to you." she says remorsefully.

Shelby gave one last glance to her dearly departed friend before walking over to the the sink to wash her hands. Tonight is going to be a very long and difficult night for the medical examiner. As she put the latex gloves on, preparing to examine the young woman's body, she couldn't help but think that her

own thought daughter could and probably would have taken Dani's place on her table and in that bag. It was a thought she was determined not to dwell on as she proceeded on with her work.

* * *

** 24:25 (12:25 am):**

** Bullpen**

The rain pouring down on the roof with the occasional roar of thunder served as white noise for Quinn, who had her once wild, short mane tied up into a pony normally well composed agent had dark circles under her eyes. She had been her for hours and hadn't slept at all. The senior agent had her head in her hands and her fingers as deep into her forehead as they would allow her to go. This little affliction of pain was the least she felt that she deserved. Quinn Fabray had failed today, for the first time in a long time. She failed to protect Dani from the sick little game Brody was playing with her. The team, her team, had lost a member of their little dysfunctional family because she allowed her guard to be down, while the bastard had been creeping around in the shadows waiting for his kill.

Quinn failed to take the bullet for her wife and give Brody what he wanted. She had let Brody get inside of her head and doubt her gut instincts and today he had won, for now.

Quinn looks over at Dani's now empty desk for the first time since Puck had dropped her off at the bullpen to go back to the crime scene to collect evidence. The senior agent doesn't remember much about the journey back to headquarters. She doesn't even remember how she got to her desk. The last thing the blonde could remember was the way Dani looked on that pavement.

_Quinn fired off the last rounds left in her clip, as the agent accepted the fact that shooting into thin air was useless. Brody was long gone by now, and all that was left was the carnage he left behind. The gun slips out of her hand as she walks over to Puck was still standing where she left him, covered in Dani's blood. She kneels down on both knees next to the body on the ground and takes a good look at it for the first time since the fallen agent was shot._

_A puddle of blood from the exit wound formed around Dani's head. For a moment, she was reminded of the fallen angels that her mother used to paint portraits of fallen agents that appeared on nearly every wall of her childhood home in Lima. Dani's skin begin to pale,as her body goes into rigor mortis._

_What got to Quinn the most was the way that Dani's eyes were looking at her. The eyes that only a few moments ago lit up with joy as hard ass senior agent, who showed no affection to anyone at work except for Tina, said that Dani did a good job today. The pale green eyes that she looked forward to seeing every morning, almost as much as she looked forward to the first of many of her tall cups of black coffee. The eyes that she ended up falling for and breaking one of her rules for after a tumultuous first meeting on Air Force eyes that were once full of life, were now dull and lifeless. Just like the victims they dealt with every day. It was almost as if she were looking at a stranger._

_It was then that Quinn realized that the only person in her life that she considered to be her family was gone. That now she truly was alone._

_Quinn stood up stoically and walked away from the body, not being able to deal with it anymore. The senior agent did not notice Puck come out of his haze and call for back up. She did not see the looks on Agents Evans and Lopez's face when they saw the body of their dead friend for the first time. The agent didn't notice Puckerman putting a comforting hand on her shoulder and escorting her to the car through her tears. Quinn didn't see the medics, Metro police or Shelby and Mike arrive as Puck drove off in her car back to the bullpen._

The blonde agent looked over at the empty desk, once again. Puck must have called Dani's older sister Brooke to come get her things before he went back to the rooftop. All of the nick knacks that the raven haired agent left on her desk were stress ball that Puck gave her after he came back from assignment in Cuba a couple of years ago. The little Princess Leia pez dispenser Sam had gotten for her after his first assignment on their team as a thank you for keeping Puck's hazing in line. The hand craved wooden picture frame that she had made for Dani as birthday present. Quinn had been smiling while playing with their Jethro, their purebred German Shepard, during their weekend getaway to Virginia Beach last was missing as well. The only thing left of Dani's existence on the team is her black leather chair. The chair was still turned facing in the same direction that Agent McKenzie had left it in this morning before they went off to MTAG for a briefing. It was the same position Dani had always preferred it to be in, right in front of the senior agent's desk.

Just as Quinn turned around, facing forward again, a figure appears at her desk. Dani is as tanned as she had been that morning. Long brown hair perfectly primed, neatly flowing below her shoulder. She was wearing the navy blue NCIS jacket and white jeans that she had worn when they left. This time there was not a drop of blood to be found. Dani's were hands on her hips as her green eyes looked down at her suspiciously, as if she were preparing for an interrogation. The senior agent reluctantly looked up at the deceased woman's forehead only to see that the bullet wound was still there.

" Why me?" Dani asks. She calmly points to her stomach, where there was a small indentation in her vest.

"Wasn't one bullet enough for you, _Quinn_?" she asks, with a bit of malice in her voice.

Quinn doesn't know what to tell her. She had been asking the same question of herself all day and still could not come up with an answer that will bring Dani any comfort.

"I don't know." Quinn replies confused and in an uncharacteristically shaken voice.

Tired hazel eyes try to zone in on her wife, but she just doesn't have the strength to do it. The guilt that she feels consumes her as Dani moves from her spot near her desk and moves over to Quinn's desk. She slams her hand on top of Agent Fabray's desk and stares directly into her eyes enraged.

"You don't know? You don't know! Come, on! What's that famous _Fabray_ gut telling you now, huh?" Danielle says venomously.

_Nothing,_ she wanted to tell her but thought better of puts her head down in shame as Agent McKenzie walks up to Quinn's chair and grabs the arm forcefully.

"Why did _I _die instead of _you_?!" Danielle screams brokenly, as Quinn looks down and puts her hands on her ears, having enough and not being able to stomach the look Dani was giving her right now.

She didn't know why Dani had to die and she was still alive and it was tearing her apart. Brody wanted Quinn. He was, for some reason,obsessed with killing Quinn. Why did her Dani have to fall victim to the sick game Brody was playing with her? She just didn't know and her gut was certainly not helping her now.

When she looks up again, Dani was gone. The opening of the bullpen's elevator doors breaks Quinn out of her embattled thoughts.

She turns around to see the three remaining members of her team shuffle their way out of the elevator, soaked from head to toe, in the same navy blue NCIS jackets they wore this afternoon. Quinn had absentmindedly told Agent Puckerman as he was heading back to the crime scene to tell Lopez and Evans that they could go home and take tomorrow off. All three agents had refused and volunteered to spend however long it would take to gather enough evidence at the warehouse that would help them find Brody.

Puck walks up to her desk with a plastic bag in one hand and a manilla folder in the other, as Sam and Santana stayed close behind him.

"Boss, we found Brody's sniper nests." Puck tells her. Quinn gets up out of her chair and walks over to the other side of her desk. She takes the folder out of Puckerman's hands and studies the photos.

"He was in an abandoned office building in the East." Sam says after a few moments, taking over for Puck.

A look of realization passes through the hazel eyes of the agent, as her mind flashes back to this afternoon.

_She looks through the scope of her rifle, pointing in the direction of the office a moment, she thought that she had seen something move in the corner of her eye. She waited a few seconds more before she turned around and focused on the noise she heard behind her._

Brody was right there in front of Quinn the entire time and she didn't even see him. He had a clear shot at the agent and he didn't take it. Not once did it cross her mind that he could have been in that close to where they were.

Agent Puckerman reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a small plastic bag.

" He didn't place his brass." Puck tells her as he gives the bronze shelling casings to the blonde agent.

Quinn tilts her head and looks at him questioningly. A she raises her hand to get a better look in the bag. Puck flinches a little thinking that the boss was going to smack him in the back of the head. But to Puckerman's surprise and shock, the slap never comes.

"They're La Poer 308's." Sam says, trying to be helpful. She turns back to her desk and opens up a desk takes a step back and looks on at his boss, worried that he may have pissed her off a little more than she already was.

" Uh-I didn't mean that you couldn't boss, I was just trying-" he stutters, just as the senior agent pulls a pair of eye glasses out of the drawer. Quinn stops the probie before he embarrasses himself anymore, giving ammunition to the other two agents to use later on.

"I can't without my glasses, at least at night." she admits waving him off, dismissively as she slips the agent slips the glasses on her ears.

"La Poers match grade sniper ammo, you guys find any bullets?" she asks.

"Uh-" Puck begins but is interrupted by Santana.

"None that matched the casings. I left three guys on the roof searching. Puckerman, Evans and I will head back up on the roof, boss." Santana said tiredly. It was the first time the normally sarcastic brunette had said anything since they left the bullpen this afternoon.

Agent Fabray noticed the unusually quiet demeanor of the agent and the dark circles that had started to form around Santana's eyes. Santana had ben Dani's probie, when the latina had first started working at NCIS. In the beginning, the two butted heads constantly. Santana initially made fun Dani for being a prude, even going as far as describing her sexual exploits in great detail whenever her mentor was in the room, knowing it would make the other agent uncomfortable.

Two years ago, Quinn remembers to separate the two of them after they got into a fight in frustration over the way Dani interrogated their prime suspects in the murder of a Marine, who Santana had known from high school. Santana thought that her mentor had been too soft on the suspect, while Dani disagreed. The older agent had won for all intents and purposes, but Santana would always say that the only reason she one was because Matt, the old lab tech, pulled her away too quickly. Puck of who of course, filmed the confrontation from the beginning, says past year and a half, their relationship had gotten better and Dani became one of Santana's closest friend. She had a feeling Santana was beating herself up in the same way that she was right now.

"Santana, you're soaking wet, go put some dry clothes on." Quinn orders her, almost motherly. Santana doesn't move from her spot and crosses her arms.

"Brody's rooftop, wasn't much higher than ours. The rooflines behind us were lower. No telling how far a full metal jacket would go after killing Dani." Quinn tells them, flinching a little at the end.

"How does she know it's a full metal jacket?" Sam asks confused. He didn't know much about guns and ballistics. Sam was still learning how to use his own weapon properly. The probie had only been working at NCIS for a year in Norfolk and about six months in DC, after graduating from MIT with a computer science degree.

"Did you see Dani?" Puck asks him. Sam looks down at his feet guiltily before answering.

"I didn't want to."

Sam only saw Dani's body for a couple of seconds on the rooftop before turning himself and a hysterical Santana away. He wanted to remember the Dani that he was working with this morning, the one who made fun of his Superman tie and laughed boisterously when Puck took it off of him and played hot potato with Santana as he struggled helplessly to get it back. He didn't want to remember her as just another corpse on Dr. Corcoran's table.

" Her head was intact." Puck tells him, trying to comfort the shaken up agent.

"So, she didn't look bad?" Sam asks, almost child like. Puck puts his arm around probie's shoulder sympathetically.

"No, not at all probie. In fact, a little mortuary putty right here, she'll be as good as new." he assures him while pointing to the middle of his forehead. Wanting to lighten up the heavy tension in the room, Puck turns to the probie.

" Of course, she was having a bad hair day though, right back here" he continues, gripping the back of Sam's head and letting go a few seconds later.

"Cause a full metal jacket will put a hole the size of a grape fruit right about there-" he jokes as he tries to put his finger behind Evan's head. Sam slaps his hand away and stares pointedly at the his mentor.

"Noah, please." Santana begs, not being able to handle the banter between the two agents anymore. Seeing Dani that way had freaked her out and she didn't want to her them talking about it. While Quinn is trying her best to keep her composure and not rip off Puckerman's head. Puck looks at his colleagues and noticed that no one was laughing.

"I'm sorry kid." he apologizes directing it at Santana and the boss. She nods and brushes it off. Quinn interrupts their moment tries to get everyone's focus back on Brody. She holds up the bullets for everyone to see.

"Three rounds? Only one hit?" she asks suspiciously.

"Well, he must have popped off a couple of rounds, while you were weaving across the roof." Puck tries to explain. Quinn shakes her head.

"I was standing still when Dani was shot."she counters.

"Evans measured the distance at nearly 600 meters." Puck tells the senior agent.

"572." Sam adds.

Puck takes in a deep breath and looks down, before saying what he had figured out a couple of hours ago.

" There was a slight shift in the wind, he misses you and hits Dani." the junior agent concludes. Quinn's mind goes back to the roof top.

_Quinn moves her head around the roof top frantically for any signs of Brody while Agent Puckerman stands there, not moving, looking at Agent McKenzie's body. She focuses in on the flag nearby and notices that it was still._

"There was no wind." Quinn says definitively.

Puck and Santana look at each other quizzically before turning their attention to back to their boss. Sam on the other hand, walks over to his desk and starts playing with a pen.

"So, what you're saying is that he was aiming at Dani? You're the one he wants to kill? Why bother with Dani?" Puck asks, outraged.

Sam puts the pen back down and before the senior agent could say anything, he speaks up as Agent Fabray walks over to his desk, examining the damaged controller on his desk.

"Brody had a thing for Dani. For years." Sam confesses.

All eyes are on Sam as the probie looks down and puts his hands in his khakis. He knew withholding this information from the boss was stupid, but he respected Dani's wish to keep this a secret from everyone else. He looks at Quinn and goes on.

" She told me that he was always coming on to her,in autopsy, when he kidnapped her and let her go"

Agent Fabray looks at Santana, who nods her head, confirming that probie was telling the truth. A few months ago, she was ease dropping in on probie and Dani talking about Brody while she was dropping a file off for Shelby. The junior agent meant to interrogate Dani about it later on, but let it go. At the time, she didn't think it was worth wasting her time on trying to find out why Brody was obsessed with her mentor.

"What? She never told me that." Puck says hurt. Puck thought that he and Dani were practically badass fraternal twins. He had made it his mission to know everything about Dani's life and invade her privacy, in spite of her many protests. It stung that she would leave him out of the loop like this and that he could not figure it out for himself.

"Gee,what a surprise,Puckerman." Santana says sarcastically, rolling her eyes. Puckerman turns around and looks pointedly at the other brunette.

"What was that Lopez?" Puck asks her before he smacks her upside the head, her pony tail. Not having the energy to deal with their bickering today, Quinn looks up at them exhausted.

"Don't do that Noah." Quinn chastises him. She turns to Sam and points to the bullet hole in the metallic briefcase.

"When was this hit, Samuel?" she asks gently.

"When I was pinned down, boss." Sam replies.

Quinn holds up the controller for Sam to see.

"Did he have a good shot at this?" she asks, pointing to the large bullet hole in the briefcase.

"Our car was between the terrorist and the controller. There's no way he could have hit it." Sam explains. His blue eyes look up at his boss.

"Boss, I'm-I'm so sorry. I should have realized it was Brody." he says regretfully.

"Why didn't he pop Evans?" Puck asks curiously.

" Oh thanks, a lot Puck." Sam says sarcastically.

" Hey, all I'm saying is that you are a sizable target, that controller wasn't." Puckerman replies defensively. Agent Lopez shrugs her shoulders in agreement. Sam looks at them in disbelief. Even when they weren't in the best of spirits, Santana and Puck always found a way to gang up on him.

" Are you two trying to say that I'm fat." he asks, looking down at his abs sees him doing this and uses the opportunity to cheer himself up a bit.

"No... I mean, maybe a tad bit around the waist. Little flab under the chin." Puck tells him as Sam puts his fingers around his jaw to feel for any fat.

"That new protein shake you're on is doing you no favors Evans." Santana adds smirking, feeling a little like her old self again.

Quinn, who was not paying any attention to them, notices that Brody couldn't have shot Sam even if he wanted to. The way that he was positioned, wouldn't have allowed him to do so.

" He didn't have an angle on Sam." the blonde agent says defending the probie.

"You owe that shooter from the warehouse a "thank you" note. He saved your life." says Santana. Sam looks away, not exactly thrilled by the news. Agent Fabray ignores her and continues on.

"The bullet entered here. It could have ricocheted into the car." she continues. Sam walks away from his desk and turns to boss.

"I'- I'll get on it boss." he tells her, determinedly. Quinn nods at him then looks at her phone. She turns to Puck next.

"Tina should be in by now. Noah...see what you can do about that brass." she says giving him a look. Puck nods his head, understanding what the boss is really telling him to do.

Quinn walks away from Sam's desk and walks back over to her own. She grabs her NCIS jacket and throws it on. The senior agent felt useless around the office and she needed to get away to clear her were stuck in square one and they were no closer to finding Brody than they were a few hours ago and it was making her lose her she had her jacket on, she turned to the three agents, who were watching her closely.

" I'm going for coffee. Can I get you three anything?" the senior agent asked.

Puck's brown eyes bugged out and looked at his boss as if she had grown an extra head. The boss had never been nice to him in the nine years he had worked at NCIS. _She must have been in really bad shape_ He says to himself.

"No." Puck replies, scratching the back of his head.

"No, thanks." Sam says confused.

"I'm fine over here." Santana says as she walks over to her desk, ready to get back to work.

Quinn looks at the for one last, before she picks up her phone and walking out of their bullpen. She gets into the elevator and disappears downstairs. When Puck sees Quinn enter the elevator, he turns around facing Santana and Sam's desks.

"That's a first" he says as he walks to his own desk, that was on the left side of Agent Fabray's desk. Sam looks up at Puck from the computer as he sits down.

"She called me Samuel." Sam says. Quinn never called anyone on the team by their name. Not even the director. She either called people by their last names or the little nicknames that she came up for them.

"Fabray patted me on back." Santana adds, as a look of disgust briefly passes her face.

The boss was not a sentimental, touchy feeling kind of person. She had kept most things to herself, a personality quirk that they shared. Quinn her hardest tried not to get too attached to anyone or anything in this unit. Most of the time Santana thought that Agent Fabray had no feelings and was more or less of cyborg.

"It was kind of nice." Sam says, smiling a little as Puck shakes his head at him.

"Nice?! I don't want nice. She's not Fabray if she's nice." Puck says incredulously.

Puck knew Quinn Fabray to be a lot of things by a lot of people in the last nine years he had worked there. But nice was not one of those things, unless you were Tina or Shelby.

As the elevator comes to a stop, Quinn walks out of it hastily and walks to the exit of NCIS headquarters. She walks down the steps, as the heavy rain had yet to subside and onto the sidewalk. A black SUV with Marine plates drives by her and the blond agent regards it for a moment, feeling a bit strange. She brushes it off as her being exhausted and her body finally succumbing to everything that had happened today. Maybe she would go back to the house and let Jethro out for a bit before leaving him with Dr. Corcoran for a while. She couldn't be in that house tonight or any other night for the foreseeable future. There were too many memories there..Pulling the hood over her head, Quinn walks into the alleyway.

* * *

**01:30 am**

**Forensics**

Tina sat at her desk, with her blue streaks of hair in her face, staring at the black and white cartoon vampire bat,that was supposed to be a caricature of her fangs and all, in her hands. Dani had drawn that for the first two months the agent began working for NCIS. At first, the forensic scientist hated it, thinking that the new blood was making fun of her and the way she's dressed. Tina had dealt with it enough in high school and didn't need to deal with it from some new agent that would be out of here in six months. She also saw the way Quinn and Puck looked at Dani in the bullpen, one more discreet than the other. She did not want this new agent to come in between the two people she had considered her family.

As the six months the new agent had been there rolled by, the forensic scientist grew closer to Dani. Tina found the new agent easier to talk to about certain things than she couldn't with Quinn or Shelby. She quickly found out that the other girl was spontaneous, adventurous and willing to try anything more than once, in spite of Puck and later Santana's insistence of her being a prude. In the last few years, Dani had become the best friend Tina had ever had, and she couldn't believe that the agent was gone.

"You're a mess girl." a familiar voice teases, breaking her out of her grief filled thoughts.

Tina lifts her head up and turns around in her chair, thinking that the lack of caffeine and sleep depravation were causing her mind to play tricks on her. But to her shock, Agent McKenzie was

standing right behind her with her hands on her hips and a smile. Although this Dani was a far cry from the one that she had coffee with this morning.

Agent McKenzie had on a bleached blonde wig with a big black cross on her neck. She was also wearing a black laced dressed with a high slit that Tina had lent her last Halloween for a costume party gig for her friend Joe's band. Dani had managed to guilt Quinn into going, who in turned forced the rest of the team to tag spite of Agent Lopez's many complaints on the way to the gig.

Dani walks up to her desk, shaking her head at what she sees.

"Red eyes, no makeup, if ever there was a time for black lipstick its now." she says lightly.

Tina allows a small smile to appear on her face. She looks down at the black tube of lipstick for a moment before picking it up and applying it on her lips. When she's done, she presses her lips together lightly and stares at her reflection in the small mirror that she had on the wall. Dani appeared behind her.

"Remember when we first met? I couldn't believe you were a forensic scientist. I thought Goths had bats for pets or vise versa." Dani remembers.

Tina throws her head back, trying to contain her giggling. It was Dani's first day on the job and they had been investigating the death of a Marine, whose parachute didn't open up in time. Quinn had been down in autopsy with Shelby and her old assistant Matt, trying to get more information. And Dani had mistaken her for a suspect that they were supposed to interrogate. After a few minutes of the agent trying to get Tina into the interview room, Quinn came up and explained to the frustrated agent that Tina was their forensic scientist.

Tina wiped her eyes with her hands, looking at her old friend.

"I really liked you, Danielle, a lot." she says, with a tremble in her voice. Dani rolls her eyes and pats her on the shoulder.

"Don't you dare start that again." Dani says sternly.

"Now, where are your pigtails? I _love _your pigtails." she asks, moving on for the other girl's sake.

The forensic scientist takes one of the rubber bands on her wrists off and gathers her hair. She slips the rubber band back on her hair, before moving on to the next one.

"That's better." Dani says. She turns around, taking a couple of steps back.

"You were _very_ persistent ,stutters." she says playfully. "First the dark lipstick, then the black fingernail polish. Next thing you know, I have a tattoo on my ass."

Tina vaguely remembers the night Dani had gotten her tattoo. They had been working together for a year and a half at the time and they had just closed a trying case. The two women went out for drinks and by two am, Tina was able to convince friend Brett, who owned a tattoo shop to work on Dani's first tattoo, in spite of Dani being too wasted to give consent. As her friend worked on a drunken Agent Mckenzie's tattoo, she went on and on about her inappropriate attraction to their boss. How Agent Fabray would do something to infuriate her one minute and turned her on in the next. By the time they passed out at four in the morning, Dani had a small heart with a little "Q" in the middle. After that night, Tina dedicated herself to playing matchmaker for her lonely boss and her new friend,.

"Hehe, that was a great night." Tina says. Dani's eyes widen as she realizes something.

" Oh God, Shelby and Mike are gonna see it!" Dani says horrified.

The two women look at each other for a moment and break out laughing. It was the first time that Tina had genuinely laughed and it felt good to know that even in death, Dani still found a way to make her laugh even if it was at the agent's own expense. Dani was the first one to stop laughing.

" I'm dead and I'm embarrassed. How could this day get any worse." the ghost says as she puts her hands over her eyes and continues laughing, struggling to keep her composure.

"Haha." Tina says as she pulls up the sleeves of her white lab coat and wipes her eyes.

Puck walks in with the bullet casings to find Tina sitting and laughing at her desk, alone. He couldn't believe what he was seeing. First the boss is acting like she was human and now Tina was laughing at thin air. What could possibly happen next, Santana admitting that she was in love with him?

He shrugs off his thoughts and approaches Tina carefully.

"You okay?" he asks her, looking at her with one of his eyebrows raised.

Tina looks up and notices that Dani was gone and Agent Puckerman standing behind her. She stands up and wipes off the dust off her lab coat and turns to him.

"I will be, as soon as I tie up my pigtails." she says with a smile. Tina tightens the rubber band on her pigtail and drops it.

"There, now what can I do for you?" she asks him.

"You are weirder than Fabray." Puck tells her as he walks over to the island in the middle of the room.

"How so?" Tina asks him, with her curiosity getting the better of her. She hadn't seen Quinn all day and didn't have a chance to talk to her since Shelby came in and told her about Dani.

"She's being _nice._" he says.

Tina looks at him, had no clue as to what Agent Puckerman was talking about.

"Quinn is always nice." she counters, confused.

"To you and Shelby maybe. Me, she growls at. Sometimes while smacking me upside my head." Puck says as his hand automatically goes to the back of his head. For the first time in nine years, his head didn't feel swollen and he wasn't sure that he liked it very much.

"Which makes you feel wanted." she says understandingly. He looks down at the shell casings in his hand.

"Yeah." he says simply.

" So, what do you got for me Puckerman?" Tina asks as she is takes the bronze shell casings out of his hands and examines them. She knows that Puck isn't the best when it comes to talking about the way he was feeling and decides to give him a break.

"308 casings from Brody's sniper's nest." Puck says. The goth takes the shell casings out of the Ziploc bag and puts them into her hands.

"You guys would give me the most popular caliber in the world." she says sarcastically, setting the casings down on the table next to her computer.

"Well, hey I just found them." he says defensively as he puts his hands in his jacket pocket.

"Can you tell me what weapon he used?" Puck asks, not waiting for the scientist to respond.

Tina questioningly looks at the agent.

"A 308?" she says, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Puck rolls his eyes his eyes.

"No, what model 308, Chang." he says slightly frustrated. Tina crosses her arms over herself defensively, not knowing what Puckerman wanted from her.

"You don't know?" she asks.

" Would I be asking _you _if I did know?" Puck counters, feeling his agitation grow. He had other things to do and Tina really wasn't any help in moving things a long a bit faster.

"Well how am _I _supposed to know?" Tina whines tiredly, with her shoulders sagging a bit.

"Because you're the firearms expert." Puck reminds her.

A light bulb went off in Tina's head. The energy that had drained from her earlier had suddenly come back with a bang. She began to pace around her lab table to her computer, moved the reports she had been working on earlier and pushed them over to the side. She nods her head a begins to login into her computer.

"That I am. And when I'm done, I will tell you the primer,the percentage of nickel and copper in the brass, whether or not all three rounds were fired from the same weapon, which you assume but I can prove or disprove." Tina rambles as she points in Puck's direction, as she continues on.

"I will tell you who manufactured the the ammo, the batch number and perhaps where it was sold. I will _also, _with some degree of of accuracy, tell you if it was fired from a lever action, a bolt action,a semi-automatic or an automatic weapon."

Tina walks over to the island where Puck is and slams the shell casings on the desk.

" _However,_ there is no way in _hell_ I can tell you which of the _eighty-seven_ different 308 models fired those rounds!" she shouts as she puts her head in her hands, exhausted.

Puck looks on helplessly as he watches his friend break down. He had no clue what to do or say to her to make her feel better. He couldn't even make himself feel better at the moment. The team was slowly falling a part, that even the boss seems just as hopeless as the rest of them felt. So he looked on for a moment and let Tina get it all out as he runs a hand through his mohawk, nervously. He approaches the desk, calmly.

" The rounds were La Poers." he says gently. Tina raises her head up.

"What?" she asks confused.

"La Poer made the ammo" he says, reaching out and grabbing one of the shells. " Logos are on the rim." Puck uses his pointer finger to go around the edge of the bullet. Tina follows the agent's finger and sees the engraved words "La Poer". She doesn't say anything for a moment before looking at the agent with unshed tears threatening to fall from her eyes.

" Puck, I'm gonna miss her so much." she says hollowly. Puck wraps his arms around her waist and squeezes her as tightly as he can. She nuzzles her head into his neck, finally letting it all out.

"Me too." he confesses softly into her jet black locks.

* * *

**01:59 am:**

**Outside of Forensics**

Brody rolls down the windows of the car, with the duffel bag in the passenger seat and parks it a few feet away from the window of the forensics lab. He looks out the car window quickly,checking to make sure that there was no one walking by, before pulling out the black rifle from this afternoon. The rouge agent briefly pulls out his cell phone and scrolls through his inbox, hoping to find the message that he was expecting to had sent the woman a dozen text messages alone, hoping that she would answer him to at least tell him to stay away. But his disappointment, there was no message to be found. Brody throws the cellphone into the seat and looks into the scope of his rifle and sees his target, the forensic scientist, hugging Agent Puckerman in her office.

He angles the rifle until the cross hairs of the rifle land perfectly onto the scientist and the agent. Brody squeezes the trigger and releases it.

Tina hears a loud crash coming from the window and feels something fly past her, nearly hitting her arm. Puck grabs her quickly and lands on top of her as they hit the floor. The bullets continue to rain inside of the room, with no signs of stopping anytime soon.

Meanwhile, Quinn is walking up to the MTAG building coming back from her much needed coffee was trying to balance two large cups of coffee in her hands while getting through the rain. As she walks pass the forensics lab, the senior agent moves her head as she feels something fly past her and breaking the window to the forensics lab.. The cups of coffee in her hand fall to the ground as she pulls out the gun out of its holster and takes off into the building in a sprint.

As soon as it was safe, Puck pulled his hand gun out of his holster of his belt.

"Ahh." Tina squeals, hitting Puck on his chest. He looks down at her.

"You hit?" he asks concerned. Puck rolls off her and stands up, dragging her to a nearby table.

"No." she grunts out. "You're heavy."

Puck pulls his gun out and crouches down by the window, firing off a couple of rounds

"Sorry about that." he says. Tina's hand accidentally lands on his abs.

"God, no wonder you're so heavy, Puck, you're all muscle" she says, patting his stomach in awe. Puck pushes her hand away as a bullet ricochets off the black island table.

" Tina, shh." Puck says quietly, not taking his focus off of that window. The forensic scientist looks down at his butt and taps it lightly.

" Hey, you've even got a nice booty." she says and winks. Puck turns to her,smirking.

" Is this how you deal with getting shot at?" the junior agent asks.

"I don't know, this is my first time." Tina says innocently as she shrugs her shoulders.

Puck leers at her for a second as copious amounts of spank bank images cross his mind. A bullet flies through the window and nearly nicks his shoulder reminding him of what is going on and fires a couple of more rounds out of the window.

" Tina?" Quinn yells as she rushes into the lab. She turns all the lights off and crouches her back down. Puck turns his head, facing Agent Fabray.

" Boss, get down, taken fire." he tells her urgently.

Agent Fabray bends her back down and rushes to turn the lights off in the room.

Brody blankly looks out the window at the building one last time. He clicks the rifle and the round lands in his gloved hand. He tosses out the remaining round into the pouring rain and takes off.

As they hear the sounds of tires skidding away, Puck looks out the window, checking to see if the shooter was still out there. Quinn, who is moves to sit next to Tina, looks up and is relieved to see that Puck was okay. She turns her attention to Tina seeing that she is shaking a little.

"You ok?" the senior agent asks, panting slightly.

"Yeah." Tina says, nodding her head.

The senior agent then turns over to Agent Puckerman, who bends down to her level.

" Close all the bridges between Anacostia Park and tell Metro cops its a crime scene." she orders.

"Ok boss" he says.

Puck gets down on his knees and is about to crawl away, when Quinn grabs him by the leg and pulls him back.

"Wait, what if he has night vision scope?" she asks, stopping him. Agent Puckerman gets as low onto the ground as he can, nodding in agreement with his superior. Wondering why he didn't think of that in the first place.

" That's a good point, boss" Puck replies.

He turns around, with his Sig Sauer in hand, and crawls his way out of the room.

Quinn turns in Tina's direction and looks at her worriedly. It was the second time today that she had underestimated Brody and how ruthless he is. Because of her mistake, nobody on her team was safe anymore and everyone was a target. She was still trying to figure out the rogue agent's angle. Why go after Tina or Dani, when he has had plenty of opportunities to kill her or Sam when he had the shot? Whatever angle he was playing at, she would make sure that her team was prepared at all times, even if it meant storming into Director Schuester's office and ordering a total lockdown of the building.

" I will get you bullet proof glass." Quinn says determined.

"There's no such thing, Quinn." Tina says.

"Ok fine, bullet resistant glass then." Quinn counters. She looks at Tina's hair and sees a piece of glass sticking out. The blonde agent gently takes the glass out of her hair and flicks it off.

" Brody didn't shoot at you and hit Dani by mistake did he? He's after me now?" Tina asks dreadfully.

Quinn didn't know what to say to comfort the forensic was coming after the people that she cared for the most. He wanted her to suffer to the point where the senior agent begged for death out of guilt for not being able to stop him. Brody had already taken so much from her today that she refused to let him take the piece of mind of the rest of her team in order to get to her.

"I was walking by the window when he fired." Quinn lies.

Tina takes one look at her, knowing that she was lying. As much as Agent Fabray liked to think that nobody could read her well enough to know whether or not she was telling the truth she could. One look into the blonde's expressive hazel eyes and she could see that Brody was beginning to get to her. And that she was terrified at what he might do next.

"You're only saying that to make me feel better." Tina pouts. Quinn wraps her right arm around Tina and pulls her in close.

"I'll keep you safe, Tina." the blonde agent promises.

_I'll do whatever it takes to keep you all safe. For Dani's sake and my own._

* * *

**03:30 am:**

**Morgue**

Dr. Corcoran signs off on the small jar in her hands, completing the last of her samples for the night. She had been working on Danielle for the last few hours and was ready to put an end to this nightmarish night. Her friend, from what she could tell, had died in optimum health. There were no

physical signs of disease. Her organs had been functioning well and would be of some good use to a sick person who needed them. There was something in her preliminary findings though, that made her hope that Agent Fabray had taken her advice, for once, and had gone home for the night.

She places the jar down on the table gently and looked down at her friend. The white sheet covered all of her body up to her collar bone. The expression on her face was serene and peaceful, almost as if she were just in a deep sleep. The medical examiner remembered fondly all of the times Dani used to come in whenever they were working a case around the clock and grabbed one of the white sheets, laying down on one of the silver tables and fell asleep. It didn't bother her one bit that she had slept in a room full of corpses.

Shelby looks at the fallen agent's eyes and suddenly sees them blink open. Green eyes stare at Shelby and smile.

"I appreciate you keeping me covered in front of the others, _especially _Puckerman" Dani thanks her, as her nose scrunching up in disgust at the thought of Puck seeing her naked. Shelby shakes her head chuckles at the fact that even in death, Dani did not want to give agent Puckerman the satisfaction of being able to say he saw her naked.

" Yes, well I know how modest you are." Shelby cracks. Dani's smile fades away after that and her eyes look downcast as the mood in the room suddenly becomes somber.

"_Were_. I'm dead now,Shelby." Dani corrects softly. The medical examiner shifts her feet uncomfortably, realizing her mistake and poor choice of words.

"I shouldn't be dead, I could have killed Brody right here in autopsy when I had the chance." Dani recalls, bitterly. It should have been Brody on this table and not her. But because she listened to her heart instead of her gut, Dani had lost her life and everything that mattered to her.

_Shelby takes her attention away from her ailing assistant on the silver table and focuses in on Agent McKenzie, who was in the middle of a stare down with Brody. The agent had her hand hovered over the scalpel. She looks like she is about to grab it until she looks into their captor's eyes. By the time she snaps out of her daze, it's too late. Brody grabs the scalpel and tosses it before grabbing Dani by the neck._

"_That was a test, Agent McKenzie." he says coldly._

As Shelby is brought out of her flashback, she moves closer to the table.

"Why did you hesitate? With Brody?" Shelby wonders. It was a question that had been in the back of her mind since ever since that day.

Dani's eyebrows scrunch together, as she remembers what she saw as he looked down on her. The pain and anguish that Dani saw in Brody's crystal blue eyes, made her second guess herself. From what she had read about his life based on his file, they had similar upbringings. Neglectful parents who had high profile jobs, who didn't give a crap about their children. And as soon as they had the chance, they disowned them. In that moment, she felt a certain kinship to Brody and for a moment, he reminded her of Quinn.

"His eyes. There was something about his eyes that made me not want to kill him." Dani says solemnly.

Shelby looks down at her sympathetically.

"His eyes were like ice to me." Shelby says softly, looking away from her.

In all of the encounters that the medical examiner has had with the double agent, there was not one point in time that Shelby had ever fallen for the facade that Brody thought other people wanted to see.

From day one, she saw a darkness within him that unsettled her for some reason. One that she couldn't explain until now. If only Dani had seen him for what he really was in the autopsy incident, maybe she would have had the courage to kill him then.

Shelby looks down to see that Dani's eyes were closed once again.

The medical examiner looks up and sees the silver doors of autopsy open and a frazzled looking blonde storming towards her. When Quinn gets close to her, she quickly covers up the rest of Dani's body with the white sheet. On top of all of the things that senior agent may be dealing with, she did not need to see her wife that way again.

When Quinn stops pacing and looks up at Shelby, there were dark circles underneath the wild and blazing hazel eyes. She looked worn down and wet from the rain. There was also a big brown coffee stain that ran down her shirt. As Shelby was about to offer the agent a change of clothes, she was interrupted.

" Brody fired into Tina's lab." Quinn rushes out. Shelby's brown eyes widen in disbelief.

" Good Lord." Shelby states, shocked. She knew that Brody was ruthless, but she did not think that he would stoop as low as he has.

" It had to have come from across the river from Anacostia Park." Quinn continues on, ignoring Shelby.

"Was Tina hurt?" Shelby asks, looking concerned. Quinn nods her head.

"No. She is a little shaken up though, Puck is with her." Quinn replies.

"In the lab?" Shelby asks, walking over to the other side of the room and into her silver cabinet.

She reaches inside the cabinet and grabs the vintage scotch, a square bottle with golden liquid in it and a couple of red plastic cups. Normally, Shelby waited until after work to drink alone or go over to Agent Fabray's house and share a drink with her and Dani sometimes, if she didn't feel like being that obviously was not going to be happening tonight.

"In the bullpen, writing up an incident report." Quinn tells her.

The senior agent's gaze fell upon the white sheet covering up Dani's body. Her jaw clenches and she wraps her hands around her stomach, suddenly feeling nauseous. A lump formed in her throat and the guilt that had temporarily subsided with the situation in Tina's lab, came back in full force.

"Should have brought in a new M.E., Shelby." Quinn observes distractedly, her eyes never leaving Dani's body.

"Couldn't. Not for Danielle." Shelby says solemnly. Shelby wanted to make sure that her friend was well taken care of. She knew that any other medical examiner would have seen her as just another murder victim. The medical examiner felt Dani deserved more than that for her sacrifice.

Quinn nodded her head in agreement as Shelby poured the golden brown liquor into the plastic cups. The M.E. offered a cup to the senior agent, who politely handed it back to her. Quinn just could not find it in her to drink tonight. With Brody still alive and somewhere out in the city, threatening the people she had come to care about. Her Dani's lifeless body was right in front of her and it was all her fault. Quinn balls hands into a small fists at her sides. Dani was right, it should have been her on that table.

Quinn walks up to the table and stares down at the spot where Dani's face should have been. Her fingers hovered around the edge of the white sheet and for a moment, she was tempted to lift it up and look at Dani's face. Her hands drop to back down to her sides before she does.

"I've lost my fair share of men and women in combat. You hope it doesn't happen, but it does." Quinn says, with a rasp in her voice.

Dr. Corcoran pulls the stool from the table up to the counter and sits down on it. She nervously takes a sip out of the glass and observes Quinn carefully. The medical examiner had known the senior agent since she first began at NCIS. In all of that time, she had never seen Quinn Fabray as terrified as she looked now. The agent's fearlessness was one of the reasons why she had moved up the ranks so quickly and left her being the youngest field agent to have her own team at twenty-five. It was unsettling to see her this way and the medical examiner knew that it was only bound to get worse for her friend.

"But this time is different." Shelby states simply as she takes another drink out of her glass. Guilt began to consume the medical examiner, as she remembers a conversation she had with another agent last week.

_Shelby had walked into the bathroom, intent on calling her daughter back. She had been on a conference call with another colleague all morning, talking her through a tough autopsy and missed the dozens of calls, twenty text messages and four panicky voicemail messages from the young mother. It was her granddaughter's first day at daycare and even though it was in the same building that Rachel had worked in, she was still a nervous wreck about it. Shelby thought that maybe if she managed to calm the frantic woman down a bit, she would stop harassing her at reaches into her purse and searches for her cellphone._

_As the medical examiner walked further into the bathroom, the sounds of someone throwing up, coming from the last stall at the end, caught her attention. She puts the phone back into the her purse and knocks on the slightly ajar stall door._

"_Are you alright in there?" Shelby asks. The retching noises stop as the occupant starts coughing. Shelby opens the door to find a brunette woman hunched over the toilet and holding on to the rim. The woman turns around and Shelby sees that it is Agent McKenzie. Shelby walks up to her and puts her hand on her forehead._

_Dani swats her hand away and clears her throat._

"_I'm fine Shelby, just got a little sick at breakfast is all."Dani assures her with a tight smile, as she stands up and brushes off the imaginary lint on her black pants. _

_Shelby squints her eyes at the agent skeptically, not believing her story. Quinn had come to her earlier,concerned that there was something wrong with Dani. According to the senior agent, Dani could only eat a little orange juice and a piece of toast for breakfast that morning, without throwing up. The medical examiner had felt sorry for the girl remembering that the last time she felt that way was when she was pregnant with her daughter Rachel._

_Shelby's eyes widen and she puts her hand on her mouth,as she figures out what is going looks down at her standard issued black boots, not looking up when she feels Shelby's hand on her shoulder._

"_How far along are you,hun?" Shelby asks softly._

"_About six weeks or so." Dani says, with a smile. " It's the reason why I went to see Director Schuester a few days ago about taking a few months off as soon as we catch Brody." _

_Shelby's eyes light up as she takes the young agent into her arms in a big bear hug. Dani giggles at her friend's attics as the medical examiner releases her from the hug._

"_Congratulations, momma! It looks like we'll have another little addition to the team." Shelby squeals,while rubbing Dani's stomach._

"_Does Quinn know that the invitro worked this time?" Shelby asks curiously. Dani bites down on her lip and looks down._

"_I haven't had the opportunity to tell her yet. We've been fighting a lot about the protection detail and Brody. Piling on a baby on top of all that, didn't seem like the best idea." Dani admits, feeling a little guilty. Shelby looks on in understanding. She had fallen victim to Quinn's misplaced wrath the other day, when the senior agent felt like she was not getting a cause of death fast enough for her. _

"_When are you going to tell her?" Shelby asks._

"_When we catch Brody and he is rotting in a federal prison cell, I promise I'll tell her 'll be in a better mood and won't be such a pain in the ass"Dani jokes._

_Shelby laughs while Dani pokes her finger into the medical examiner's chest._

" _Promise me you won't tell her or anybody else on the team, until this whole Brody case is behind us?" Dani asks. _

"_They won't hear it from me. You have my word, Dani." Shelby says hugging the break away from the hug._

"_Good." Dani says, relieved. The junior agent turns around and walks out of the bathroom._

"But it shouldn't be. Dani was an agent, she knew that she would have to lay her life on the line." Quinn argues, walking away from the table and running her hands through her hair and startling Shelby out of her thoughts.

"But you're right, it is different." Quinn sighs.

The medical examiner takes one last swig, before standing up, facing the blonde agent.

Quinn turns away from Shelby, as pools of tears form in her eyes and her face feels red, as the feeling of grief overwhelms her. It has finally hit her that Dani wasn't gone and that she was never going to see her again. She was alone, once again and there was nothing that she could do to fix it this time.

"Why Shelby? Why Dani and not me?" Quinn asks tearfully. The medical examiner takes her into her arms and lets her cry. _She has to know the truth. I can't keep your secret any longer Dani_ Shelby thinks to herself as she rubs the agent's back soothingly.

A few minutes pass before Quinn wipes the last of her tears onto the sleeve of her jacket. She takes a couple of deep breathes and composes herself, not wanting to show any more of her weakness than she already has.

"I may know why Dani had been a target for Brody. Or at least part of the reason why." Shelby tells her hesitantly, biting down on her bottom lip, not trying her best not to look at Quinn.

" Yeah, he was infatuated with her, Sam already told me about it." Quinn reveals. Shelby looks on surprised, not knowing that Dani and Brody knew one another before he attacked autopsy.

"They met two years before Dani joined NCIS. They went undercover together." Quinn continues on, looking at Shelby quizzically. "And to try to get to me. Those are the only reasons I can come up with so far." Quinn crosses her arms and her back straightens out. "Unless there is something that you're not telling me, Shelby."

" I put a rush on Dani's blood tests and the lab techs should have them ready as soon as they get in." Shelby says, staling as long as she can.

"Great. Thanks for doing that, but what does this have to do with why Brody killed her?" Quinn asks impatiently.

"As you know, last week Dani was feeling rather ill and she told you it was a stomach virus, correct?" Shelby asks, picking up one of the jars on the table and playing with it. Quinn's patience was wearing thin, not in the mood to play mind chess with the medical examiner.

"Dammit Shelby, will you spit it out already! Tell me what you know." Quinn says forcefully.

Shelby turns away from the senior agent and speaks softly.

"Danielle was pregnant." The medical examiner pauses and sets the jar down. "According to her, she was about six weeks along." Shelby looked up to see the senior agent's reaction.

Quinn's expression was blank, with her lips in a thin line,as she tried to digest the news. It can't be true? Shelby must have made a mistake? She hadn't noticed Dani showing any signs of being pregnant. Outside of her being sick last weekend, the raven haired agent didn't have any morning sickness that she could remember.

" Are you sure?" Quinn asks hollowly. Shelby turns around and stares at the broken agent.

"Yes.I called her doctor earlier while looking for her medical records and she confirmed the pregnancy." the medical examiner says, with a lump in her throat. "I'm so sorry, Lucy."

Quinn doesn't respond. She clenches her hands so hard, she almost feels her blood pulsating through her veins. How could she have been so stupid? Dani was pregnant and she had been going through it alone all this time. While she had been obsessed with catching Brody and making him answer for his crimes. Now she had lost the one person that had been her family for the last seven years and their had every right to be angry with her earlier. She had been more angry with herself.

"It's just a theory. Maybe he didn't know about the pregnancy and he really was targeting you." Shelby states, trying to comfort her friend and herself. She'd like to think that she was wrong and Brody would have never shot Dani if he had he'd known about her condition.

Quinn shakes her head at this as the pieces come together.

"No, no. Him sniping Tina means he's after my people. Starting with the women." Quinn concludes.

Shelby did not want to believe Quinn or her own intuition, but it would fit her opinion of the double agent. If there was anything that Brody was good at, it was detecting the weaknesses in his opponent

and using it against them. The team is Quinn's weakness and he was going to come after each of them before he killed Quinn.

"Then he's torturing you." Shelby stated. "One has to wonder what made him such a sadist."Shelby inquires more to herself.

Quinn sees red. She couldn't find it in her to have sympathy for the rouge agent. Not after everything that he has done to her and the way he was terrorizing her made a vow for herself and Dani that she was going to make sure that Brody had gotten what he deserves, a place on one of Shelby silver tables.

"I don't give a damn! I just want the bastard dead!" shouting as she walks across the room and storms out of the double doors, leaving the medical examiner alone.

Quinn made a vow to Dani and to herself that she was going to make sure that Brody had gotten what he deserves. A spot on one of Shelby's silver tables.

Once she was sure that the senior agent was out of site, Shelby took her cellphone off of the table and dialed the number two, hoping that the other person would pick up. Don't rain on my parade played for thirty seconds before the voicemail picked up.

"_Hello, this is Rachel Barbra Berry. I am currently occupied at the moment, but if you leave a message with your name, number and contact information, I will get back to you in as soon as possible. Thank you."_

"Rachel, hun, it's mom. I need to talk to you-about Brody. Please, please call me back as soon as you get this. It's important." Shelby says, hoping that Rachel would get this message sooner rather than later.

She hangs up the phone and goes back to cleaning up. God help Brody if Quinn gets to him before the FBI or the rest of NCIS does.

* * *

**05:30 am**

**The Embassy hotel**

A brunette in her late twenties or early thirties, walks out of the golden double doors of the hotel 's wearing a black pants suit and a white blouse with a gun holster strapped to her hip. The black three inch heels clicked on the ground as she carried the sleeping two year old in her arms, waiting patiently for the taxi to arrive. She had overslept this morning and in her rush to get to her first day of work on time, had forgotten the little girl's baby carrier.

The young mother only had to wait a couple of minutes before the yellow taxi pulled up to the curb. The cab is put into park as the tall, grey haired cabbie walks around to her side of the car. He opens up the door for her.

"Thank you." she says softly, trying not to disturb the sleeping little girl in her arms. The driver doesn't answer her and grunts as he closes the door.

" Where are you headed to, young lady?" he asks in a gravely voice.

"Washington Naval Yard, sir." she replies, chocolate brown eyes looking down at the child, brushing some of her sandy brown hair back. When the infant's curly hair is back in its place, the young mother looks up at the cabby through the mirror.

" My name is not 'young lady', sir. It's Rachel Berry." she points out with a smile, reaching out her free hand to the driver. He looks at it for a moment, rolling his eyes and huffing before turning his attention back to the road.

As they drive pass the hotel, Rachel sees a black SUV drive pass them, slowly. Suddenly, she feels a chill run down her spine, feeling that something was off. Her left hand lightly touches the black Sig ready to use it, if necessary. The black SUV comes to a stop and parks onto the side of the street, across from the Embassy. She tries to get a better look at the driver, but fails to see through the tinted windows. She sighs in relief as her hand goes back to the little girl's back rubbing it softly.

The windows of the black SUV roll down as Brody's tired, blood shot eyes stare menacingly at the departing cab. His hair fell flat and a bit of stubble had formed on his face. He reaches out to the handle of the glove compartment and pulls out his phone. He had spent the night trying to get Rachel to talk to him, to understand where he is coming from and see how unreasonable she was being.

_Maybe this will get her attention. _The rogue agent thought to himself. Brody looks over the message one last time, hoping she'll answer this time.

I've seen you,Rachel. You can't hide from me any longer. We

need to talk.- B.

He presses the send button and throws the phone back into the glove compartment and closing it. Brody rolls the window back up and puts his head on the steering wheel.

_This will all be over very soon._ He assures himself. Starting the engine of the truck, Brody takes off in the opposite direction, preparing for what is to come.

* * *

**A/N 2: Thank you all so much for the reviews and follows, really appreciate it. Sorry for taking so long to update, life has just been a little crazy the last several weeks. But I promise the next chapter won't take nearly as long to write as this one did. Again, thank you for reading the story and hope you enjoy it.**


	3. The New Arrivals

**Disclaimer: Don't own anything except Dani. NCIS and Glee belong to CBS studios and Fox. Just borrowing them for fun.**

* * *

**07:15 am**

**Evidence Garage**

Sam rolls himself out from underneath the Black Honda and sits up, wiping his hands on the pants leg of his orange jumpsuit. He and Tina had spent the last three hours taking apart the car, looking for anything that Brody could have left behind and so far, they were coming up short. He brushes the stray hairs out of his face and looks up. His lips curl into a dopey yet satisfied looking grin as he watches Tina, who is also wearing an orange NCIS jumpsuit, bent over the trunk of the car and oblivious to his leering.

Sam had always had a special place in his heart for the goth forensic scientist, since the first time he saw her last year. He had overheard her talking animatedly with Puck, who looked like he would rather be anywhere but near Tina at the moment, about a computer game that she had recently gotten had asked Puck earlier if Tina would have been interested in him, and all the junior agent did was throw his head back and laughed at him, saying that Tina was more or less into guys with tattoos and piercings on ever inch of their bodies and whose uniforms consisted of nothing but leather chaps. That she would definitely not be interested in some nerdy, boy band reject. Dani, who had heard part of his conversation with Puck, told Sam to ignore Puckerman like Tina did when he tried to sleep with her, and encouraged him to go for , he took a chance and walked over to her and talked about his favorite parts of the game and watched Tina's brown eyes light up as they went to her , they went back to her place a few hours and spent the rest of the night getting to know each other in her black box spring coffin bed. At some point during the night, talking became unnecessary.

Since he's transferred from Norfolk to the main headquarters, he has not been back to her coffin bed. And it wasn't for his lack of trying or loss of interest. It was because one of the boss' rules were that you never dated a coworker, even though Quinn herself had broken that rule when she married her coworker. Sam was also smart enough to know that if he ever hurt Tina, the boss would have his head on her mantle piece. So he kept things professional and friendly with the forensic scientist, but that still did not stop him from thinking about her every once and a while.

"Hey Evans, come take a look at this!" Tina shouts, holding something in her blue gloved hand as Sam stands up and takes a couple of steps over to the trunk.

"I think... it's a 308. And stop staring at my ass" she adds, glaring at Sam from inside of the trunk. Sam takes the blue gloves out of his pockets and puts them on. Then he picks up the small clear jar on the messy wooden table and opens the lid.

"Drop it." he tells her. Tina drops the bullet into the awaiting jar. The probie takes a couple of steps back, with the jar, and continues to stare at Tina as she bends back over.

"I think I've got another one for you." she announces from inside of the trunk, as she sees the slug tucked underneath the mat of the trunk.

Neither Tina nor Sam heard or saw a fuming Quinn come out of the elevator doors and enter the main entrance of the Evidence Garage. Her face was slightly tinted red and the dark circles under her eyes are more pronounced now than they had been before. She had spent the rest of the night going over the evidence that they had gathered,for what felt like hundredth time, preparing herself to confront the director after she was done here. She had every intention of telling Terri that she and her team were going to go after Brody, whether they were authorized to or not. In her mind, the man was guilty and she was going to make him answer for what he had done. And any evidence that they would gather after her talk with the director would be a bonus.

Sam briefly looks back and sees Quinn on her way over to them. He backs away from Tina as quickly as he can, turning red,as the forensic scientist gets up from out of the trunk.

"Boss, we uh, we-we-we we found a .308 slug" Sam stutters, scattering to show her the evidence jar and embarrassed about nearly being caught ogling the forensic scientist.. Tina walks over Sam and places the other slug inside of the jar.

"Two, actually. They were plugged in the trunk" Tina points out. Quinn takes the jar in her hands.

"These were fired by the dirtbag in the warehouse?" Quinn asks calmly. Her hazel eyes harden into a steely gaze, looking at the slugs. She could not bring herself to say his name at the moment, afraid of taking her anger out on her team.

"Those, I found in the right side of the car. Nine mil slugs." Tina answers.

" Brody missed his first shot and hit the controller with his second." Quinn recalls, putting the pieces together. She turns her attention to Sam.

"Where were you before you took cover?" Quinn asks him.

Sam crouches down by the edge of the car, near the wheel in the same position he had been in yesterday.

"Right here." He tells her. Quinn tilts her head and nods.

"Lopez was right. You do owe that terrorist a thank you." Quinn deadpans as Sam stands up.

Before she could say anything else, the grey elevator doors open as Puck strolls in, wearing a grey suit and black tie. He had taken a few minutes to change out of his clothes from the day before after he was done dealing with the Metro police.

"He didn't police his brass, again." Puck says, handing Quinn a manilla folder.

"Metro PD found a .308 casing in the park, next to the tracks." Puck continues on, putting his hands in his jacket pockets. Quinn stares at the junior agent, raising one of her eyebrows at him.

"And?" Quinn asks, annoyed. Puck shrugs his shoulders at her.

"Nothing." Puck answers, disinterestedly.

He was secretly hoping that some of his inaction would get to the boss and she would go back to being normal and slap him upside the head. Even if it was only for a second.

Quinn takes a deep breath out, trying to control herself.

"I was waiting for you to tell me..." Quinn explains, but is interrupted by Puck.

" To tell them to bring the evidence here ASAP?" Puck asks finishing her statement, as Tina and Sam share look at Puck in disbelief.

" Do I really have to tell you that, Puckerman?" Quinn asks agitated, with one hand on her hip. Puck nods at her with a smile.

" You always do." Puck says, proudly. Quinn ignores him and begins to walk away. She turns around and looks back at Puck.

" Tell Metro PD to.." Quinn orders, but is interrupted once again.

" Already did, boss madame. " Puck says with a smirk. " Oh and the Director wants to see you in MTAC."

Quinn turns around and walks into the elevators, not saying anything more to the aggravating junior agent.

When they are sure that Quinn is gone, Sam and Tina surround Agent Puckerman, not believing what they had just witnessed and what Puck was trying to do and if he had a death wish. Tina crosses her arms and glares at Puck as he stands there with a satisfied smirk.

"Why are you baiting Fabray?" Tina asks accusingly. She couldn't tell if he was being extremely sweet, like he had been in their conversation before, or extremely stupid for trying to bait Quinn in her time of need.

"Trying to get her to stop being so damn nice, it's creepy." Puck explains.

"I like her nice." Sam says pouting, as Puck glares at him and tries to hit him in the back of the head.

Tina walks up to the table and grabs the evidence jar. She steps in between the two bickering men, attempting to get them to behave for a few seconds as they make their way back up to her lab.

"The agency doesn't pay me enough to babysit these two."Tina mutters to herself.

* * *

**10:20 am**

**MTAC**

The senior agent walks into the dark conference room that more or less resembled a movie theater. There were twelve rows of black and grey bucket seats and a big screen that took up about a quarter of the back of the room. It was where the Director and sometimes Quinn, would take video calls from generals to the CIA on whenever there was a case that required their presence.

As Quinn walked down the steps to the front row, she noticed Director Terri Schuester sitting in the front row, with a white headset on her dirty blonde hair as her blue eyes covered in black rimmed glasses, her attention focused onto the had worked with Director Schuester ever since they had both begun at NCIS ten years ago. Quinn was twenty-three at the time and Terri thirty-seven. Terri was the only person at NCIS that the senior agent had any respect for and over the years, they have come to understand each other. Even though Quinn knew that the Director thought she was more trouble than she was worth. Terri was firm, yet fair and would often reluctantly agree with Quinn's unique way of handling her cases.

When she gets down to the last step, Quinn sits down in the open seat next to the director and crosses her ankles together. Terri watches the screen with intrigue, as a man dressed in black paces back and forth in the parking lot, not hearing the senior agent approaching.

"What have you got for me, Fabray." Terri asks, without looking up at Quinn.

" Brass from Brody's sniper nest. Tire tracks in Anacostia Park, where he fired a shot across the river into our forensics lab." Quinn tells the Director. Terri turns toward Quinn and frowns.

"Isn't it a bit unusual for a sniper not to police their brass?" the Director asks.

"Yes M'am." Quinn replies.

" I've received calls from every director I know, promising to hunt down this sniper as if he'd killed one of their own." Terri says reassuringly.

_I bet they do. _Quinn says to herself, while fighting the urge to roll their eyes. She knew the only reason the other agencies wanted to help was to cover their own asses. It wouldn't look good for any of them, especially the CIA,if they had to explain how they let a Rouge Mossad Agent kill one of another agency's people.

"CIA might be the most help. Brody Weston was one of their moles." Quinn recommends.

After a few minutes of silence, Director Schuester turns her head and looks in the direction of the senior agent.

" I've endorsed your recommendation to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Special Agent McKenzie." Terri tells her.

Agent Fabray came to see her yesterday, before Terri went home for the night after Agent McKenzie was killed, and asked her about giving the award to the fallen agent to commend her sacrifice and work with the team over her last seven years at the agency. It had only taken Director Schuester ten minutes to decide and sign off on the necessary paperwork.

" Thank you, m'am." Quinn says quietly, looking down at her hands. The Director turns her head facing forward once again, getting back to the case.

" According to your after-action report, no one actually _saw_ the sniper who killed Agent McKenzie." Terri states.

" Brody was on a rooftop six hundred meters away." Quinn explains.

" Extraordinary shot." Terri says, mildly impressed.

"No, M'am. Not exactly." Quinn says disinterested and looks away.

"You were a Sniper with the Corps, weren't you Fabray?" Terri asks.

" Two tours." Quinn confirms with a small smile.

Quinn had become one of the first few women to pass through to serve as a sniper in the Marines when the United States opened up combat positions to women on the front lines. She had been at the top of her class and completed two tours before being honorably discharged after her contract was up and joining NCIS.

" Desert Storm?" Director Schuester jokes with Agent Fabray shaking her head in the negative.

"I'm not that old,m'am." the agent states quietly, feigning offense. "Kuwait and Kabul."

The Director shrugs her shoulders and chuckles.

" Hm, thought you were older. My mistake." the Director deadpans as her lips curve into a smirk. Sometimes she forgets that Quinn is only thirty three years old, as the senior agent seemed to be too wise and yet too young to be as cynical as she is.

The sound of beeping breaks the director and her young charge out of their banter as one of the computer techs turns around, headset in place, staring at the screen before taking the image and projecting it onto the big screen behind him. On the screen, there were two men, who were agents of Mossad, were dressed in black standing by a blue van. The taller of the two men was standing there, talking into an earpiece

"The target vehicle is have a hard lock." The man says, turning back around and going back to his computer. The woman next to him turns around and addresses the director.

" Target confirmed. Engage." she says, clicking on something on the screen. She presses down on the enter button. " Weapon free."

The Mossad agents run away from the van as the missile hits the trunk of the van, engulfing it in flames. The room erupts into applause as the techs on the floor and the other agents present stand up to leave the room.

Director Schuester and Agent Fabray remain sitting as the room clears out, leaving the director alone with the team leader.

"Now where was I?" Director Schuester wonders, looking at Quinn.

" You were avoiding using Brody's name and sniper in the same sentence, m'am." Quinn says bitterly, as they watched the others walk to the doorway and walk out of MTAC.

Terri sighs, trying to keep her own temper in check and tries to reason with the stubborn woman in front of her.

" Look, your anger is understandable Quinn." Terri says sympathetically. "You lost one of your own agents and now you want payback."

"No m'am." Quinn denies, even though senior agent would love nothing more than to see Brody downstairs on one of Shelby's tables.

"Unfortunately, it's a passion I can't afford." Terri says nonchalantly. Quinn raises her eyebrow at her the director, not expecting her boss to be so candid with her answer.

Terri would have loved nothing more than to send Quinn and the remaining members of her team out on a witch hunt to bring back the former Mossad agent back in a body bag. Unfortunately, it would have been career suicide to authorize such a mission, especially with relations between Mossad and their agency being as strained as they were at the moment.

"Do you honestly think that Weston had nothing to do with Dani's death?" Quinn asks softly after a few moments of silence.

" No. But there are those out there who do." the Director says frankly, referring to the CIA.

The vultures there had been hounding the director all morning, trying to make a case for the rogue agent's innocence. They had even tried to convince her to drop the investigation all together and have Dr. Corcoran rule Danielle's death an accidental death. The director was having none of it and politely told the agency that her best people were looking into the matter, before promptly hanging up afterwards.

" Those who ran him." Quinn says incredulously, not believing what she was hearing. " Those who thought they had the Holy Grail of moles!"

"Those people are covering their asses right now!" Quinn finishes angrily.

"Make sure that you have yours cover when you bring him in, Fabray." Terri sternly warns, knowing that the investigation was about to turn ugly on all sides real fast.

"Won't be a problem, director. Because I don't plan on bringing him in." Quinn says mysteriously.

The director glares at the senior agent, a feeling of unease suddenly coming over her. Quinn crosses her arms and stares back at her boss defiantly.

" C'est la vie." Terri says indifferently as she stands up and brushes off the dust on her black skirt.

" You're not my problem anymore, Quinn." She points toward the agent, who remained in her seat.

" You're firing me, m'am?" Quinn asks, crossing one of her legs over the other, getting comfortable.

"I've been offered a Deputy Director's position at Homeland Security. As of five minutes ago, I ceased being your boss." Terri answers simply as she stands up the stairs and into the isle way. Quinn stands up and follows behind her.

"You'd really leave NCIS, m'am?" Quinn asks.

Terri turns around at the question, facing Quinn.

" Well, the agency could certainly use some younger blood." Terri jokes as she approaches the door.

"Who would be replacing you, m'am? Because I won't to do it!" Quinn tells her. Quinn hated the suits and the last thing the senior agent ever wanted to be was a suit. Not like she would have had the job long rolls her eyes and as she opens the door.

When she does, a man with curly brown hair, who towered a little bit over the director, stands up from his spot in the back of the room,making his presence known. He brushes off the dust wearing a nicely tailored black suit without the jacket and. He's wearing a black vest with the buttons perfectly in place and the sleeves of the white blouse he had on underneath rolled up to his elbow.

Quinn couldn't see the face of her new boss well because of the dim lighting in the room, but that did not stop her from feeling that there was something familiar about the man that she could not place at the moment.

"Quinn, as much as I like you, I wouldn't shoot NCIS in the head like that." Terri laughs as she hands the folders in her hand over to the man.

"She's your problem now, Director." Terri warns the man as she walks out of MTAC one last time.

Quinn walks up the isle way and stops as the man's face comes into view. Hazel eyes widen in horror as her new boss' brown eyes smirk, highly amused at being able to catch the stoic agent off guard for once.

"Why hello, Quinnie. Shall we skip the "long time no see, you haven't changed a bit" schtick and move on to the main event?" the man asks her as she approaches him.

"Of course we can, St. James. Why should we start lying to each other now?" Quinn answers with her own smirk, finally recovered from her earlier state of shock.

Quinn and Jesse have known each other since their sophomore year at Lima High School. Quinn, rather reluctantly, joined the school's glee club after taking the fall for her friends at the time, the Skanks, for setting the Glee club's pianos on fire. Jesse, who was the male lead of the club and basically made all the decisions for the winning show choir, had deemed her tremulous alto acceptable enough to be his female lead. The last one that the glee club had quit because of the amount of pressure Jesse had put on her. Being the leads, they were forced to spend time together in school and outside of school, with Jesse pushing her to her vocal and patience limits constantly.

Over the next year, Quinn found out that Jesse wasn't as bad as she thought he would be, in spite of his many flaws and unstoppable ego, Jesse turned out to be a good friend to her when he wanted to be. He let her stay at his place, whenever Quinn and her usually drunk father would fight. Jesse held Quinn as she cried after coming out to him at their junior prom, even after having dated for the last six months. He even made sure that his father made a show of recording the both of them at graduation because Russell refused to attend.

They kept in touch with one another with the occasional email and text message after high school. But Quinn found it hard to keep in touch, not knowing where she was going to be stationed next. By the time Quinn's contract with the Marines ended, she had lost all contact with her best friend.

It wasn't until Quinn's first day at NCIS that she saw Jesse for the first time since high school ended. She had been called into Director Schuester's office to find the boy smirking at her, as the director announced that he was going to be her new partner. Afterwords, Jesse spent the night explaining in great detail, dramatics and all, about how after his first year at NYU he abandoned his dreams to be on stage and discovered his new dream of becoming an NCIS agent and eventually the position as director of the agency.

For three years, under the guidance of their boss Sue Sylvester, Jesse and Quinn traveled all over the globe as undercover NCIS agents. They became two of Sylvester's best probies and in a short amount of time, received many accolades and commendations that caught the attention of the higher ups of the agency. When Agent Sylvester announced her retirement, Quinn was the first in line for taking her position. Shortly after, Jesse was offered a chance to lead his own team in Paris that would help him move up in the ranks of the agency. He accepted the position without a second thought.

Not wanting to lose contact with his friend, Jesse occasionally makes the trip back to DC to check on Quinn. He was there to give Quinn away at a wedding that he didn't think would happen.

The last time the senior agent had seen the field operative was during his brief two day stint in DC before he was due in Tel Aviv on assignment. He had barged in at 3 am, nearly missing the bat that Quinn had swung at his head, as he used their spare key to get inside of the house. Jesse laid around on the couch all day and left his things everywhere for Dani or herself to pick up. He had used all of her wife's hair products and shower gel. For a moment, Quinn thought that she would need to put her demanding friend into witness protection before Dani had gotten a hold of him. The morning that Jesse was scheduled to leave, he woke up to find all of his things packed neatly at the door, with a taxi waiting outside.

"Will taking orders from me be a problem for you Fabray?" Jesse challenges her, falling into step with Quinn as they exit MTAC.

"As a Director, No." Quinn tells him as they walk down the busy hallway. "But as my dramatic, arrogant and overly demanding sometimes best friend, possibly."

Quinn turns around and walks away as Jesse stands there confused. Once he realizes that she is not next to him anymore, he speed walks, catching up to her.

"Lucy..." he says sternly.

"Kidding Jesse, you were a damned good your undercover work was a bit sloppy and pedestrian" Quinn adds, fighting back a smile.

" Maybe if my partner that was more awe inspiring than the one I got, my performances would have been better." Jesse bites back, chuckling.

" Whatever you say Director." Quinn says as they come to a stop underneath the stairwell.

Wanting to get back to the matter at hand, Jesse's expression turns serious as he prepares to tell her what his bosses have told him. The director decided to wait until he could get her alone to ask her about Dani, not wanting to put the closed off agent on the spot.

" You do realize that you and your team have no physical evidence linking Brody with the shootings?" Jesse asks her carefully. Hazel eyes glare at her friend as he does not give her a chance to answer. "No wonder agencies abroad have their doubts."

"The bastard has killed one of my people and he's after the rest!" the team leader tells him forcefully. Jesse takes a step back,as Quinn takes a step forward, getting into his face. She looks the mildly intimidated director into the eyes and points a finger at his chest. " And I'll tell you something right now. No suit with a tight sphincter is getting in my, way." Quinn steps away from him and walks away from the stairs.

"And that includes you, Jesse." Quinn finishes, waiting on the director. Puffing up, Jesse strides forward, glaring at Quinn.

"Special Agent Fabray. On the job, it's "Director St. James" or "sir"." the director commands, feeling the need to remind the angry agent of who she was talking to. He may have been her friend, but he would not let Quinn or any of his other agents walk all over him, especially on the job.

Quinn raises a perfectly sculpted eyebrow at him.

"Okay, and what about when we're not on the job? May I refer to you as Jesse St. Butt head?"Quinn asks deviously.

"Sure. If you and your team enjoy being assigned to some hell hole in the desert for the remainder of my stint as director. Then yes, you may call me that." Jesse deadpans.

"That's too bad. It was one of the nicknames from high school that I enjoyed." Quinn banters back as Jesse sighs, as his hands rub the temples of his forehead.

"_Don't_ make this situation anymore difficult than it already is, Quinnie." Jesse tells her. As they reach the bullpen.

"Sorry _Director_, won't happen again." Quinn promises.

The senior agent and director stop at her desk as Quinn grabs her brown messenger bag and keys. They notice a focused Puckerman staring a hole into his computer as the agent, not really wanting to know what he was looking at.

"Just where do you think you're going?" Jesse asks, looking down at his watch. "Last time I checked, you still have seven hours worth of work to do."

" Have to change my clothes. We can talk on the way to our... I mean, my house." Quinn tells him, forgetting for a moment that it was not her and Dani's house anymore. "And I also have to check in on Jethro. We can talk on the way to my house."

Jesse walks further into the bullpen and lightly leans on Sam's desk.

"You still have that demon? I thought you had him put to sleep? " Jesse asks, a little frightened. Jethro and Jesse had a complicated relationship with one another. No matter how hard Jesse tries to be nice to the dog, Jethro always found a reason to torture him whenever he visited Dani and Quinn.

"And you wonder why he doesn't like you." Quinn says with smile as she closes her desk drawer. _Jethro will certainly be excited to have his chew toy back, permanently. _The agent snickers to herself.

Quinn turns her attention to Puck, who looks up at his boss and casts a curious glance towards the new guy?

"Who the hell is the chipmunk in the suit?" Puck asks her, pointing towards Jesse.

"Your new boss." Jesse says for her, grinning as Puck straightens up in his seat.

Ignoring their scene, Quinn turns to Puck to get an update on the case.

" Puck, where are we?" Quinn asks, standing in front of his desk.

" Evans and Tina are working firearms analysis. I'm matching... tire tracks to the vehicle." the junior agent informs her, stumbling at the mention of Brody's car.

"No one's to leave the building. Evan's is on protection detail with Tina. We'll be back in an hour." Quinn orders as she and Jesse quickly walk away from the bullpen and to the elevator.

* * *

**01:20 pm**

**Bullpen**

It had been twenty minutes since the boss had taken off with the new director and Puck had been on two hours of sleep, he had manage to match the tire tracks found on the ground to the tires of the black Honda. The junior agent sets his head down on the desk and is planning on resting his eyes until the boss showed up again. He closes his eyes as thoughts of the waitress who served him coffee downstairs occupied his racing thoughts.

" Your mother should have washed your mind out with soap." the raspy voice of a woman chastising him, causing him to lift his head.

As Puck's vision clears and the shock wears off as he smirks as he looks up at the welcoming site before him. Agent McKenzie amazing long legs were two feet in front of his face as she sat on his desk. He looks up, he sees that she is wearing a red, black and white cheerleading uniform with her brunette locks tied up in a high pony reminded him of a photo that he had seen of Dani in high school, during her days as head cheerleader. She has her arms crossed over herself protectively and her eyes narrowed as she glared at his obvious leering.

" You're in the middle of trying to bust Brody for my murder and all you can think about is having a nooner with the poor waitress you harass every morning in nothing but her work apron?" Dani asks in disbelief.

"Was not." Puck says petulantly.

"Was too, Puck." the cheerleader replies. " I've always known what you were thinking, Puckerman."

Puck continues to leer at her, as she crosses one of her legs over the other, almost hypnotically.

" Puck?" she asks, trying to get his attention. "What are you up to?"

Agent McKenzie's green eyes widen scandalized as she notices Agent Puckerman's brown eyes darken to a shade of black.

" Puck?!I don't believe you!" Dani shouts at him, hitting his arm in the process. "I just _died _and you're having sexual fantasies?"

Puck leans back into his chair and puts his hands on his mohawk. He crosses his ankles together and his lips form into a lazy smile.

"Can't help it." Puck says, winking at her.

He continues to smile at her, relishing in the fact that even in death, he still could get the last word into their disagreements.

"Puckerman!" Dani says, as her frustration begins to get to her.

"Sometimes I used to picture you naked" the junior agent added in for extra measure.

Suddenly, a high pitch scream echoes all over the room as he laughs at his dead friend's antics.

Agent Puckerman was too caught up in his teasing of Agent McKenzie, that he did not hear the sounds of small of pitter pattering feet or the clicking of black Jimmy Choo heels come to a halt at his desk. The young woman stops and puts the hand that was not holding the infant's hand on her hip and stares at the occupied agent curiously.

"Having phone sex?" the brunette asks, full lips forming into a smirk.

Puck stumbles out of his chair a bit at the interruption and picks up the phone, pretending to be busy on a call.

" Phone sex? Uh no. Charades." Puck stumbles out his excuse quickly. He looks down and notices the small hand of a girl, who wasn't tall enough to reach the top of the desk, messing with the cup of pens on his desk and watches as the cup falls to the ground.

" Charades? Like a.." the woman asks as she picks up the girl and places it on her hip.

"Have you ever played before?" Puck asks, giving her a weird look.

"I've never done it on the phone." the brunette says, looking at the junior agent smugly, while he pretends to clear his throat.

" Yeah, my partner and I were coming up with quotes for Saturday night." Puck lies easily.

" You play charades? On a Saturday night?" the young mother asks, not believing him.

"To kill time before I go out for the night." He says as he sits up putting his leg on the other leg. "Now, who are and the little cutie in your hands over there?" Puck asks her pointing to the girl in her arms. He notices the little girl begin to squirm in the woman's arms. The agent thought that the kid was cute and that it was a shame her hot mom seemed a little uptight. She would have been perfect to take home to his mom and sister back in Baltimore.

"Special Agent Rachel Berry. CIA and Mossad liaison." Rachel says formally as she pulls out her white and blue badge, handing it over to Puck. He holds the badge into the light, checking to see that it's not forged, before he hands it back to her.

" And the little one's name is Elizabeth Berry. She's my daughter." the CIA agent introduces her as the girl hides into her mother's neck and coos."She's a little shy around strangers."

Puck smiles at the sight before him. If he didn't have his badass reputation to protect around the office, he would have told her eyes widen suddenly as he remembers part of what the woman has said.

"You're Israeli?" Puck exclaims, excited to meet one of his people. Rachel chuckles at him, while trying to balance Beth.

"Not exactly. A Dual citizenship, to be precise. My father, Hiram Berry, works as the Assistant Director of Mossad under Eli David." Rachel explains.

"And judging by your reaction just now and the star of David hackey sack on your desk, would I be right in assuming that you are Jewish as well?" she asks him, pointing to the white and blue hackey sack.

"Hell yeah! The second to last person in temple every other Saturday, when we're not working a case." Puck tells her as he stands up and gives her a high five. Rachel reluctantly slaps his hand back, not wanting him to feel bad if she didn't.

Puck sits back down and sags his shoulders, feeling a little more relaxed around the woman.

" What can I do for you Ms. Berry?" the junior agent asks.

" Nothing." Rachel says simply, walking away from his desk. " I'm here to see Special Agent Fabray."

"How do you know that I'm not Special Agent Fabray?" Puck asks, wanting to mess with her a bit.

Rachel sits over at the desk with nothing on it and sits in the black chair. She leans back in it as her grip on her daughter loosens and the little girl climbs on top of her mother, playing with her brunette locks.

"One, I was told by my superior officers that Special Agent Fabray was a woman." Rachel states a matter of fact way. "Two, you don't seem as intimidating as I've heard from colleagues that have the misfortune of working with Special Agent Fabray."

" And three, your name plate says 'Special Agent Noah Puckerman' does it not?" Rachel asks him, smugly, while pointing a perfectly manicured finger to the plate as Puck looks down at it before picking it up.

_Damn, she's good._ Puck says to himself.

"I was only joking Ms. Berry." Puck chuckles, putting the plate back where it belongs.

" Are you sure there is nothing that I can do for you?" the junior agent asks again.

"I'm positive." Rachel says, flinching a little as the girl pulls on her hair.

The room is silent for a few minutes, as the sounds of Beth cooing fill the room. Puck picks the hackey sack up and twirls it around in his hands.

"I'm sorry that we got off on the wrong foot earlier, m'am." the mohawked agent apologizes. " I wasn't playing charades. I've recently lost my partner and I was just thinking about her." He looks down at his desk.

Rachel looks on at Noah sympathetically, knowing what it's like to lose a loved one and while still caring on with work.

"I'm sorry for your loss. Were you together long?" Rachel asks.

"The last seven was my first." Puck says sadly looking down.

"You must be a very strong person to go to work after losing someone very close to you?" Rachel says

"Yeah, well somebody has to find her...wait, what did you just say?" he asks looking up at her, catching her misunderstanding.

"Your lover? You said you lost your partner, I assumed you were talking about your girlfriend?" Rachel says obviously.

Puck, not being able to help himself, holds onto his stomach and laughs hysterically.

" Whoa, slow down there. Dani wasn't my girlfriend, she was my partner here at NCIS." Puck corrects her after he catches his breath. "Special Agent McKenzie."

"But you said that she was your first?" Rachel says as Beth wraps her arms around her shoulder.

"I meant my first probie. When Dani started at the agency, Quinn paired me up with her. And until Special Agent Lopez, another one of our team members,came along four years later she was my probie." Puck explains to her as he picks up the file that he was looking at. "Now Agent fish lips, I mean Special Agent Evans, is my probie."

Rachel still didn't understand what Special Agent Puckerman is talking about or the dynamics of this clearly dysfunctional team. And at the moment she did not have time to care. Originally, the CIA agent had requested a transfer to NCIS to get her and Beth as far away from New York, and the little girl's father, as possible. She had heard from a friend that worked with the director at NCIS from time time time, that the agency would have an opening soon. One of their agents had planned on taking a leave of absence. She had expected to transition into her new position smoothly until she received a call from her boss saying that she was to report to NCIS headquarters and convince the agent leading Brody's case to not take any action against their operative until the CIA does their own independent investigation. He was still a valuable asset in the infiltration of Hamas, in spite of how questionable his actions have become as of late. Since Rachel was not an official member of NCIS yet, she was still under orders of the CIA and her boss. The way things seemed to be going now, Rachel was fully expecting the NCIS director to reconsider her transfer request to the agency.

Rachel decided to make a note of everything that Puck was telling her, in case she needed for when she officially began her tenure at NCIS.

"Besides, Agent Fabray would have my balls in a blender if I'd ever made a move on Agent McKenzie." Puck mutters quietly to himself, inadvertently breaking Rachel out of her thoughts.

"And why is that?" Rachel asks curiously. Puck looks at her for a moment, shaking his head.

"Nothing. Ms. , you can sit her and slouch in that chair with your adorable kid in your lap for an hour if you'd like. Or you can tell me what it is that you need and maybe I can help?" Puck asks one last time, suddenly willing to do anything to get the woman out of there and back to work.

Rachel sits up and looks directly at Puck, adjusting a bored and sleepy Beth into her lap.

"You can't help me Noah. Because I'm here to stop Special Agent Fabray from killing a Mossad officer." Rachel says formally.

Puck stops what he is doing he is doing, glaring at the CIA operative.

"Brody Weston." the junior agent says strained.

"Yes, that is correct." Rachel affirms. Puck looks at her for a moment longer before going back to his computer screen.

"I'd tell you good luck, but I want the..." Puck stops as he looks over at Beth. " Bastard dead too." he finishes off in a low voice, mindful of the sleeping little girl in the room.

Suddenly feeling uncomfortable again with her presence, the junior agent looks away from the computer and writes something down.

Rachel looks at him briefly, stunned that he would say anything like that about a fellow agent. If he felt that way about Brody, then she could only imagine how his boss would feel about her request to spare his looks away from him and stares down at her sleeping little girl.

_For Beth's sake, I hope I can talk some sense into Agent Fabray. _Rachel says to herself.

_That's one battle you're going to lose Berry._ Puck silently thinks to himself.

* * *

**01:40 pm**

**The Fabray house**

Jesse walks down the steps the steps of the basement, looking for the senior agent, who disappeared as soon as they walked into the door. He had managed to raid her fridge, finding a few slices of left over pizza, before a low growling caught his attention. Jethro, was standing right behind him, waiting on the director to make the slightest of movements before he would maul him, or at least that's what Jesse told himself. Fortunately, the curly haired man was able to maneuver himself away from the beast to the other side of the kitchen island and to the doors of the basement.

The new director knew that whenever Quinn was having a rough day or just needed to get away from the world, you would most likely find her either developing photographs from one of her vintage cameras or building boats in her basement. Half of the room was set up like a dark room, while the other half of the room was where her work table and tools were. He never understood his friend's hobby and secretly, he always thought the building boats thing was a front for her being a serial killer.

As he heads down to the bottom of the stairs, he sees the outline of an unfinished boat and Quinn sitting on a grey stool staring at it. He also notices that Quinn was still in the same clothes that she had on this morning.

"Is this the same boat that you've been working on for the last nineteen years, Fabray?" Jesses asks as he walks up to her. "Thought you would have had that thing finished by now."

"It's a different boat."Quinn explains, picking the black mug next to her and taking a drink out of it.

The director pulls the other stool from underneath the table and wipes off the bits of sawdust he sees on it. When it was cleaned to his liking, he carefully sits down on the stool.

"What happened to the first boat?" Jesses inquires curiously, while trying to get more comfortable on the stool

The senior agent looks at him, a mischievous gleam appears in her eyes, before setting the mug back down, turning towards him.

" Burned him." she tells him.

"Why? As I recall you were so obsessed with finishing the damn thing..." he begins to ask but stops, raising his eyebrows at her.

"You named the boat after your father, didn't you?" he asks, not expecting an answer while Quinn stands up and pushes the stool back into her work bench. She turns the overhead light off, leaving her friend in the dark.

Quinn thinks back to the time her father Russell had got her started in building her was also one of the many failed attempts For the first few months, all either one of them could talk about when they were around each other was that ended when Russell made partner at the law firm he worked schedule became too busy and ended up abandoning the boat and Quinn completely. Quinn continued to work on the boat by herself, sometimes falling asleep in the basement working on it, before Russell kicked her out of his house senior year .Before Quinn went to boot camp, her mother worked something out with Jesse's family and they agreed to keep it at their place, until Quinn bought her own and had it shipped finally finished the small boat around the time she had proposed to Dani. They had made plans to take the boat out for a weekend, if they could find time away from the job or figure out how they were going to get it out of the basement.

"Any particular reason why you would name your boat after him?" Jesses asks, standing up and walking over to the outline of the boat. Quinn visibly tenses,giving her friend a pointed glare.

"You know damn well why I did it." she tells him.

The weekend before Dani and Quinn were supposed to get married, Russell called at the last minute declining the invitation. At the time, her relationship with him had become better since Russell reached out to her after becoming sober. But in the end, the blonde knew that her father still had a problem with her being interested in women. That he still held on to the belief that Quinn would come to her senses and find a good Christian man to have good Christian children with. He sent the newlyweds a check to make up for his absence, which Quinn burned along with the boat during their reception. She has not talked to him since and as far as Quinn was concerned, Russell was dead to her.

Deciding that now would be a good as good time as any, to bring up the elephant in the room, he takes a deep breath and puts his hand on her shoulder.

"How are you really holding up? And don't give me that Marine bullshit you give to everybody else." Jesse asks calmly.

"I don't know." Quinn tells him honestly, running a hand through her hair.

So much has happened in the last day or so, that the senior agent has not had the opportunity to process it all. There was a part of her that was still in denial and expected Dani, with their unborn baby, to walk through the door and plop down on the couch, complaining about the day they've had and how hard

she's trying to make sure that Evans isn't too corrupted by Lopez and Puckerman.

Noticing that the agent seemed to be spacing out, he takes the opportunity to bring up her clothes.

"You haven't changed." he points out, as she looks at him confused.

"You're still wearing the same clothes that you were wearing this morning. Isn't that why we came back here?" Jesse asks gently.

"I was, until I got to our bedroom door." Quinn remembers. " I had my hand on the door knob and for some reason, I just couldn't bring myself to go in there. Not now at least."

"Oh Quinnie..." Jesse starts to say, but is interrupted by the blonde.

"She was pregnant." Quinn states. "For six fucking weeks she was pregnant and I had no clue, because I was too busy hunting down that bastard to care about anything else and now he's after the rest of my people!" She hits part of the framing of her boat as Jesse is left speechless. He tries to pull his ailing friend into a hug, but she pushes him away.

"Don't." the senior agent commands and Jesse takes a step backward.

"It's all my fault that she and our unborn baby are gone. He was after me and once again I let someone I love pay for my mistakes." Quinn says hopelessly, remembering that this was not the first time something like this has happened.

" And I plan on fixing that when the moment I get a hold of Weston." Quinn says determined.

"And if I were still a field op, I would be all for helping you find the son of a bitch and finding the right arrangement for his head on your fireplace." Jesse tries to reason with her. "But as your boss, that's not going to happen."

"We both know that he's guilty!" Quinn argues.

"Circumstantially he may be!" the director counters. " And until you or your team can provide proof beyond a reason of a doubt or positively prove that it was Brody who fired the gun or was in that office building, I can't let you go all Kill Bill on Weston!"

Jesse sits down on the stool he left out as neither one of them say nothing else to one another. Quinn is still fuming and swears that she'll find a way around Jesse and the other agencies protecting Brody. While the new director is worried about his friend's state of mind.

_Maybe it would be best if I just pulled her off the case altogether. Force her to take some vacation time, get her away from DC. _Jesse contemplates.

A few moments pass before Jesse breaks the silent standoff he was currently engaged in with Quinn.

"And besides, I don't want to deal with two pissed off CIA and Mossad directors." Jesse tells her. "At least not on my first day on the job" He smiles.

"Have you ever seen Eli David angry? Let me tell you, it's not a pleasant site to behold." he adds, trying to get her to smile. It works as Quinn looks at him and chuckles.

"It's the price you pay for becoming a suit." the blonde agent tells him.

Jesse shrugs his shoulders as he puts his feet back on top of the wood table.

"I thought it was going to be easier than risking my ass, breaking every other bone in my body and getting shot at every week until retire." the former agent says dramatically.

Quinn just shakes her head and laughs at her friend's antics. Jesse may have calmed down some of his diva like tendencies since joining NCIS. But Jesse will always be Jesse and nothing could change that. The blonde still doesn't know why she keeps him around.

" So what is your first assignment as the new suit? Going over case files? Dinners with some foreign diplomats and dignitaries? A conference call with the President?" Quinn asks jokingly.

"None of those actually." He says with a smirk, as he gets off the stool and walks over to the stairs. "For your information, I have a dinner date with the executives of CBS,who happen to be paying for everything by the way."

"For what? Your coming out party?" Quinn asks impishly.

"You wish." Jesse banters back. "I'm due on the early morning show tomorrow, to debrief the hosts on Dani's case and inform the public that Brody is wanted for questioning at NCIS." Quinn freezes for a moment.

"You can't do that, Jesse." Quinn begs him.

"Excuse me?" Jesse says, crossing his arms in front of him.

"Brody is targeting everyone that _I _care about, starting with the women. He's a chauvinist and unpredictable. Giving him a heads up that he's a possible suspect will only encourage him to make his next attack on my team bigger and with more fatalities." Quinn reasons.

Frustrated, Jesse rubs his temples and sighs.

"That maybe true, but the people who _you _need to convince that Brody is the sniper don't believe you. And my appearance on the show could give you more credibility than you have now." Jesse counters.

Terri had debriefed him the moment that he walked into the door. She told him that the CIA thinks that Quinn is on a self righteous witch hunt. They threatened to block everyone of Special Agent Fabray's trail of evidence if Terri did not step in and stop her. It made him curious as to why that agency was working so hard to protect a rogue agent and determined to protect his best friend in any way that he could,without overstepping his boundaries as Director.

"Do you trust, St. James?" Quinn asks.

"Professionally yes, personally it depends on the day." Jesse answers easily.

"In all the years that we have know each other, have you ever had any reason to doubt me?" the senior agent asks. It doesn't take long for the director to come up with an answer.

"Never." he says with conviction. Quinn crosses her arms over her chest.

"Well then why are you doubting me now?" she asks.

" Because, I need to establish a good working relationship with these people and I can't base an investigation on your gut." the director states.

"Who are you going to side with, Jesse, those people or me?" Quinn asks, as an ultimatum. No matter what the new director, her best friend,says, she was going to continue on with the investigation.

Jesse smiles at Quinn and copies her stance. There was not a doubt in his mind who would win that argument.

"Ask me a tough question Fabray." Jesse states cockily. Quinn shakes her head and walks around him, heading upstairs.

"Always the politician, St. James" she mutters on the way up, with Jesse close behind.

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**AN: Sorry again for the wait, I've been pretty busy with summer school and finals. Might update on a more regular basis, every week or so, now that school is out. Thank you so much for the reviews and favorites, they've been amazing. Hope you enjoy this chapter, backstory and all. Because next chapter, there'll be Faberry! Have a great week, everyone!**


	4. Special Agent Berry

**Disclaimer: Characters and concept belong to Fox and CBS. Not making any money off of this.**

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**2:30 pm**

**Bullpen**

A frustrated Agent Lopez stomps out of the elevator doors, with one hand clutching onto a tall cup of coffee. While the other one contained the greasiest burgers and fries that the chef at the little diner she stopped at on the way back to work could come up with. It had been on of the longest and most draining work days that the agent had ever experienced throughout her four years at the agency. That included all of the times she was forced to go undercover with Puckerman.

She had spent the better part of five hours, after her partner's murder, working with DC's Metro PD trying to collect every piece of evidence they could find. Unfortunately, the cops that she had to work with nearly contaminated the crime scene on several occasions, constantly asked her whether a piece of evidence would be relevant or not and generally got on her last nerve.

Sam and Puck left for headquarters after a while, leaving her in charge of clean up. When the idiots at Metro finally got everything processed and ready to go to back to the evidence room, Tina's lab gets shot into. Santana had to spend an additional five hours with them outside of the lab and in the surrounding area within a ten mile radius, trying to secure the crime scene and making sure they had all of Brody's brasses. Another NCIS agent came in and thankfully relieved her from her torment. She went back to headquarters to her desk, only to spend three hours answering phone calls and tracking down and confirming the fake tips about Brody's SUV only to come up empty.

An hour later, she slammed the phone down on the base and put her hand on her temples. She'd had enough of the constant run around from the cops, whose tips from the bolo she had put on Brody's car, came up empty. The junior agent came up with the idea of looking through Brody's personnel file for an address here in the states, only to find her security clearance was not enough. She had been arguing with a friend at their rival agency, only to be told that no one at NCIS was to have access to Brody's files.

Santana stood up from her desk to announce her departure, only to find that there was nobody around. She picked up her leather jacket and big matching purse, and stomped her way over to the doors.

It was only when she walked into the door of her one bedroom apartment, that the brunette agent had allowed herself to break down. Tears streamed down her face as she slammed her fist down on the door of her apartment in anguish over the death of her and Dani were not the best of friends starting out, but she was still her mentor and partner. Over the last year or so, Dani had become some what of a friend to her and the closest thing to a big sister Santana was ever going to have. And she didn't know what to do, now that the other agent was gone.

There was a part of her that feels guilty for not being able to save her partner, in spite of the many times that her mentor had saved her ass. Santana couldn't even go down there and see Dani's body even though everyone else, with the exception of Sam, had. The agent put her head in her hands and closed her eyes, hoping that when she awakened, this would all be a bad dream.

Thirty minutes later Santana opened her eyes and sat up from her position on the floor. Her eyes landed on a framed picture of the team at Tina's goth friends horrible gig from a few months had his tongue out and had a terrified Sam in a head lock. While she and Tina had their arms draped lightly around one another. Quinn and Dani were on the other side of the wrestling boys, as Dani had her body pressed closely to Quinn while the boss had her arm wrapped tightly around Dani. It had been one of the worst concerts she had been to and it turns out the team's antics and Quinn's constant head slapping had been more entertaining than the actual show.

Her thoughts suddenly turned to Agent Fabray .She couldn't imagine how her boss was handling this, or not handling it, at all right now and it made her feel a little bad. Fabray may have been the spawn of the devil in Santana's eyes, but Santana knew that if she was feeling as guilty as she was right now, then her boss must be kicking her own ass ten times worse than anyone on the team.

On her way back to work, after making a quick stop to her favorite diner, Santana had made a resolution to try and be civil to her co-workers and actually do what the boss had asked her to do with no argument, at least until they caught Brody. And as a piece offering, she bought food for the boys and a black coffee for the boss, just the way she likes it.

As she approached the entrance to their bullpen, something felt off to the junior agent. She walks up to the entrance of the bullpen and suddenly comes to a halt. She turns to see Puck looking interested in something on Dani's empty desk. When Santana walks a little further into the entrance of the pen, she freezes at what she sees in her partner's area.

A somewhat attractive, yet fashionably challenged woman, wearing a white blouse that clung to her tiny stature,bouncing a laughing mini me on her black skirt cladded lap and looked like she was getting way too comfortable in Dani's chair.

The agent felt a vein in her head pound a little and her teeth clench, as Puck just sat there and seemed to do nothing to get this woman out of her friend's desk. He even looked to be entertaining the woman and her child. Santana marches over there to them and takes action put a stop to whatever Puck was up to with this woman.

Puck, who had just finished going through their last dead end lead, was curious to know more about the CIA operative. In spite of his many attempts at getting dirt on Agent Berry, she had refused to answer any of his more personal questions. Instead, she had flipped it around on him and offered to guess all of the personal details that she knew about the junior agent. If Rachel was wrong, then she had to tell him something about herself that he wouldn't find in her personnel file.

"Let's see. Born and raised in Baltimore to a lower middle class family, consisting of yourself, your mother and a little sister? " Rachel says, as he nods in the affirmative. "Your father abandoned your family and became successful in the New York stock market?" Puck rolls his eyes and nods. His father was always a sore subject for the mohawked agent. The less he talked about him, the less he would have to dwell on why the deadbeat felt the need to abandon he and his mother.

" You were kicked out of two Baltimore public high schools for running illegal fight clubs in the school's basements and stealing an ATM at the local convenience stores father then paid for you to attend a private catholic school for two years, playing on the school's football team." Rachel says, watching Puck become more frustrated, wondering how she knew all of this stuff about him. "And you barely graduated with a 3.0."

" You then attended the University of Maryland College Park and graduated with a degree in history. You were also in the Alpha Beta Phi fraternity, which you still pay dues for, as recently as last month." Rachel continues. " After college, you joined the Academy and served with the Baltimore PD on their drug unit for three years before transferring to NCIS." Puck looks at her, with his mouth wide open, conflicted between being paranoid as to how she would know all of this or impressed at how good the CIA operative actually was.

"My father always told me that you never go into enemy territory blind. Always know what you're up against." Rachel says cryptically as Beth giggles in her lap. The toddler was trying to get a hold of the small gold star of david Rachel was wearing around her neck.

Suddenly realizing that he was just played by the CIA operative, Puck slams his hand on the desk.

" Hey Berry! Not fair, you cheated-" Puck yells at her, but is interrupted by the site of a pissed off Santana walking into the bullpen.

Santana throws the greasy white bag at Puck, who fumbles it around a bit before catching it. He looks at his coworker questioningly while taking the contents of the bag out.

The junior agent then slams the cup of coffee on the boss' desk hard, causing some of it to spill. She then walks over to her desk and drops the big black back on top of it. She walks back over to the woman at Dani's desk, with her eyes narrowed and hands on her hips at the woman. Beth's giggling ceases as she hides her face into her mother's neck, terrified of the scary woman standing in front of them. Noticing how tense the vibe in the room is becoming, Puck sits up, looking in Santana's direction.

"Lopez, what did you do to this?" he asks, holding up the bag trying to get her attention.

"Who the hell are you and why are you sitting in my _partner's_ chair?" Santana demands, ignoring Puck .

Rachel sits up straighter than she had been before and narrows her eyes at the angry woman.

"I would appreciate it if you could watch your language around the more impressionable set of ears in the room." Rachel says sternly, pointing down to Beth." My name is Special Agent Rachel Berry or Officer Rachel Berry if you prefer."

Santana is about to say something but Rachel stands up, with her badge in hand, shoving it in the other agent's direction. Santana just stares down at the badge, not believing what the

"I am a CIA and Mossad operative who is here on special business that does not concern you unless you are Special Agent Quinn Fabray or Director Terri Schuester." Rachel finishes authoritatively. She puts Beth down in the chair and walks around to the other side of the desk standing

Puck, who was in the middle of unwrapping his burger, stopped what he was doing and gawked at the two agents in front of him in shock. _I have to hand it to Berry, she has a huge pair of balls on her. _He said to himself. Nobody, besides the boss, had ever talked to Santana Lopez like that and lived to tell about it. The mohawked man also wondered if Berry secretly had a death wish.

Santana's hands clench unconsciously and her gaze hardens at the woman standing in front of her. _Who the hell does bird beak think she is? Think it's time to knock her down a peg or two _the agent seethed to herself. She put her hands on her hips and smirked devilishly at the woman in front of her as agent Berry looked at her unamused.

Before either one of the agents could do or say anything to one another, two sets of footsteps entering the bullpen interrupt their standoff.

A freshly changed Agent Fabray walks out of the elevator doors as Director St. James close behind. After their talk in the basement, Jesse silently volunteered to get some of her stuff out of there bedroom and gave her something else to change into. When she was finished they made their way back to work.

The drive back to headquarters was quieter than it was on the way over. Out of her peripheral vision, the agent could see that Jesse looked a bit more tense and pensive than he did on the way over to her just assumed that Jesse was still trying to process everything that she had told him in the basement, so the agent left him alone with his thoughts. Her gut was telling her that Jesse would do anything in his power to stonewall her and the was glad for the silence as she had the opportunity to do some thinking of her own. The silence continued when they got into the elevator, with the ding announcing their arrival the only thing to break it.

As soon as they get out of the elevator doors, Quinn notices Santana engaged in some sort of argument, yet again. While Puck looks on with a dumbfound look on his face and pieces of his burger dripping onto his desk and probably all over the floor. She sighs and rolls her hazel eyes as Jesse looks at her curiously.

"Kids." Quinn huffs out. She hears Jesse chuckling quietly and silences him with a pointed glare.

The senior agent makes her way over to her team's bullpen, quietly standing behind Santana as she smirks at the woman in front of her. Jesse stays a couple of feet behind her and observes his friend in amusement.

"Who are you fighting with now, Lopez?" Quinn growls out lowly.

Santana's brown eyes widen and she turns around quickly, to find the boss right behind her. She takes a couple of steps back as officer Berry moves to stand next to her. Puck takes the opportunity to straighten himself out by stand up and walk on the other side of his desk, near Santana and the boss, as his burger and some of his fries hit the floor.

While she is thinking of some excuse to give Fabray about her misconduct, she notices a curly haired man who looked like he used one too many jars of hair gel, shadowing next to the boss. A thin eyebrow goes up as Santana looks up and down at the man, sizing him up. The man stares at her for a brief moment before his eyes make his way to Berry. His face lights up into a huge smile as he walks past Quinn and over to the officer.

"Shalom." Jesse greets. He kisses her cheek on one side of her face, then the other, before pulling her into a tight embrace.

"Shalom, I miss it?" Rachel inquires, smiling at her old friend.

"Yes you did. But NCIS didn't." He answers, referring to the mission in MTAC. Jesse feels a tugging on his pants leg. He looks down to see a smiling and suddenly hyperactive Beth, who lifts her arms up.

"My favorite goddaughter! I missed you so much, Beth." Jesse coos, holding onto her tightly as she nuzzles into his neck. "Did you miss your Uncle Jesse?" She nods, clinging onto his shirt collar tightly.

The three NCIS agents look on confused. Quinn is wondering why Jesse never mentioned Rachel, let alone well enough for him to be the woman's godfather.

The senior agent turns to Puck and Santana to see what they know about the mysterious woman.

"So what have we got here?" Quinn asks Puck and Santana, as Jesse and Rachel turn back to the NCIS agents.

"Rachel Berry. CIA and Mossad operative. Also a major pain in the ass." Santana answers with a smirk as Rachel glares daggers into the latina agent and Quinn looks on unamused.

"She's also here to stop you from whacking Brody." Puck adds.

Rachel turns her attention to Agent Fabray, who acknowledges her with a nod and a small smile. She had to admit that the agent had been one of the most beautiful woman she had ever encountered in their line of work. With her short blond hair, striking hazel eyes and nearly perfect high cheekbones, she could easily pass for a model and it made her curious as to why someone with her looks would choose a job like this?

" Jesse . New director, same mission." Quinn tells her agents.

"With which agency?" Puck asks, confused. This morning he could have sworn Schuester was still the boss around here.

"Ours." Quinn replies. Santana and Puck nod in understanding, with Santana not knowing how to handle the news.

"Really?" Santana asks in disbelief. She couldn't believe that the agency would hire someone like him as their new director. The guy barely looked like he knew how to fire off a gun, let alone be the badass super spy that Puckerman had said he was.

Before Santana could say anything, Quinn sends a glare in her direction that shuts her up.

Jesse, who was trying to balance Beth on his hip, ignored Puck, using his free hand to point to Rachel.

"Special Agent Fabray, Special Agent Berry, CIA and Mossad operative." Jesse introduces the two agents. "Special Agent Berry, Agent Quinn Fabray, Special Agent in charge at NCIS."

Rachel almost reaches out her hand to the NCIS agent, but thinks better of it. According to some of the things her ex colleagues have told her, the senior agent did not like to be touched. She decides to stay on the safe side and fight her urge to be polite and keeps her hands at her side.

Quinn on the other hand, was still trying to get a good read on the new agent. She could definitely hold her own, after seeing her brief confrontation with Agent Lopez. Other than that, the other woman seemed harmless. But there seemed to be something off with Agent Berry.

"Jesse has told me so much about you, Agent Fabray. It's an honor to be able to put a face to a name." Rachel says, smiling politely at the senior agent.

"Really?" Quinn asks, looking towards Jesse, still wondering how they know each other and what he could have said about her.

" Rachel and I have known each other since our days at NYU. We've kept in contact since then and last year we worked an anti-terrorist op in Tel Aviv." Jesse explains. " You saw one today in MTAC."

"That was yours?" Quinn inquires, mildly impressed.

"I only acquired the intel." Rachel admits modestly. It had taken her nearly two years, before she got pregnant, to collect the information that they needed to bust the cell in that area. Beth was staying with her father Leroy while she wrapped up the mission there.

Beth takes her head out of Jesse's neck and sleepily looked in Quinn's direction. The senior agent looked at the little girl, noticing her piercing blue eyes looking at her curiously. She could have sworn that she had seen those eyes before, on someone else. _On Brody_.A little taken back, she pushes the thought in the back of her mind and takes a couple of steps away from Jesse and the little girl.

" Excuse me." Santana interrupts as four sets of eyes land on her, as the junior agent looks at the new director, still supicious of turns to face her and smiles.

"Yes I really am the new NCIS director." Jesse answers. Santana puts her hands in her jacket and looks down apprehensively. She still wasn't sure about this new director. She gave him a year on the job, before he went back, begging to be a field agent again.

Quinn switches the spotlight back onto Special Agent Berry, wanting to cut to the chase.

"So Miss Berry, is Brody a Mossad mole or just a terrorist?" Quinn asks curiously with a half smile.

Rachel surprised at how direct the senior agent was being, quickly composes herself before answering the agent.

" Mossad and sometimes CIA I suppose. Since I happen to be his control officer." Rachel reveals, not being thrown off in the slightest by the NCIS agent. Quinn smiles at the feisty agent.

"Ah, they promote control officers young in Mossad, I see." the senior agent banters. Rachel crosses her arms over herself.

"Have to. All the good ones begin to die off at your age." Rachel fires back.

In Mossad, you were considered lucky if you lived past the age of fifty. Even if you left the agency, there was always a target on your back. It was part of the reason why her father Leroy put her in every activity that had nothing to do with training to be the perfect mole, much to her other father Hiram's dismay. It was one of the many reasons why they were not together today.

" Do you know how I located Brody's terrorist cell?" Quinn asks, getting straight to the point.

" GPS fix off of his encrypted cell phone." Rachel explains, warily. " He wanted you to know the terrorist's location so you could stop the missile instead of him, which would have necessitated blowing his cover."

" Only an NSA satellite can GPS an encrypted phone. Brody didn't know I had that asset." Quinn explains huskily. _Try explaining your way out of this one, Berry. _

"You give him less credit than he gives you, Agent Fabray." Rachel says defensively. "Who hung up first you or him? Brody knows a fix takes only nineteen seconds."

" Last year, Brody's Hamas cell kidnapped Agent McKenzie. Why didn't he kill her then instead of freeing her to warn the Secret Service?" Rachel asks pointedly.

" I don't know. Why don't you arrange a meet and he can tell me himself." Quinn challenges the other agent. She couldn't believe that Berry could be this naïve.

" Brody Weston is a Mossad operative undercover in Hamas. He hasn't turned on us or _you_." Rachel states authoritatively. " He didn't kill Agent McKenzie."

Brody may be dedicated to the job, to the point of obsession, but he would have never gone as far as to kill another federal agent. At least, the brunette hoped he wouldn't. And Rachel would not let him go to prison or face charges of treason for a crime he did not commit.

Jesse, seeing that if he let this exchange continue on any longer, the would be having a interagency scandal on his hands, steps in and stops it immediately. He hands Beth over to Rachel and smiles at her reassuringly.

"Fabray, even if you are right, we owe them proof." Jesse reasons. Rachel smiles at him brightly as Quinn gives him a pointed glare. _Finally, a voice of reason._Rachel thinks exasperatedly.

"That's all we ask. Don't kill the wrong man." Rachel says smugly. Quinn raises her eyebrow at her.

" Like Mossad did in Norway?" Quinn challenges. Santana snorts at this as Puck mouths 'oh snap' over Agent Berry's shoulders.

Rachel rolls her eyes at the blond, her patience wearing thin with the blond and her team. _If this is how this team expresses their professionalism, then maybe it is best that I not get the position here._

"That _mistake _cost us dearly." Rachel answers as diplomatically as possible. Quinn feeds off of the other agent's frustration and goes in for the kill.

" Not as dearly as the Palestinian waiter you killed." Quinn answers, smiling smugly at the agent before her. _Better luck next time, Agent Berry._

Rachel huffs and Jesse steps in the middle of the two.

"Rachel, assure your deputy director that, even though Brody Weston is a suspect, no action will be taken unless we have evidentiary proof." Jesse assures her. He turns to Quinn and the rest of her team and directs his next message to them. "Proof _before _action."

The opening notes of Don't rain on my parade break the tension in the room. Rachel hands Beth to Jesse, and pulls the white Iphone out of her pocket. She silently excuses herself away from the others to the stairway.

A few minutes pass by and Quinn decides to look for the still absent operative. She walks past the stairway and sees the small agent still talking on the phone, but in French. She stays behind the wall and listens in.

"Jesse St. James, le nouveau directeur du NCIS est un des mes amis et peut. Il peut etre en mesure de vous aider." Rachel says quietly. "Je peux etre capable de le convaincre de votre innocence."

Quinn can't hear who is on the other side of the line, but she notices Agent Berry tense up on what was said on the other side.

"Mais pas d'Agent Fabray. Elle est une femme avec du sang dans les yeux." Rachel says solemnly a frown forming on her face.

At the moment, Quinn wishes she would have never skipped French in high school to smoke in the alleyway with the skanks.

" Oui, j'ai les passeports." Rachel says.

"Je veux te voir et je sais que vous voulez voir Beth. Pourquoi ne pas vous venez nous rencontrer a l'ambassade a la place." Rachel says, almost desperately.

Quinn watches the brunette run a tanned hand through her hair. She watches the agent's face become crest fallen.

"Je ne veux pas, te perdre." Rachel says softly. "Au revoir."

Rachel hangs up the phone and shoves it back into her dress pocket, while Quinn walks back into the bullpen, confident with the new information on Agent Berry. The senior agent was certain she was protecting someone. She had a feeling that the person on the other end of the line was Brody. If she could get Sam to trace Rachel's last few calls, they might luck out and have them lead to the Mossad operative.

As Quinn walks into the bullpen, Santana has her back turned to her as Puck is laughing hysterically at her.

"I am a CIA operative. And by that I mean Certified. In. Ass kissing." Santana says in a high pitched voiced, holding out a piece of paper in her hand. Santana puckers her lips together and smooches the air.

"Stop it Lopez! You're killing me over here!" Puck breathes out, hunched over.

Quinn rolls her eyes and sneaks up behind Santana and Puck. Neither one of them aware of her presence. The blond finds the perfect angle before smacking them both in the back of the head hard.

Puck and Santana flinch at the intrusion as Quinn walks in between them.

Two seconds later, Rachel arrives with a drowsily looking Beth in her carrier. The three NCIS agents stand in front of her as well.

"I was just stopping by to say goodbye. I need to get the little one back for her afternoon nap." Rachel says, addressing Puck and Santana.

Santana rolls her eyes and snorts before turning around and walking to her desk. She hoped that this would be the last time she'd have to see the dwarf for a long time, if ever again.

Puck takes the carrier in his hands and looks fondly at the kid. Beth reaches out her hand and rubs in it his mohawk. The little girl yanks on his hair as he jolts back away from her. Rachel laughs at them, lightly.

"Goodbye Noah." Rachel tells him, watching as he ran his hands over his neck. He really wasn't a bad guy, when he wasn't being a pig.

"Later MILF." Puck replies with a smirk as Rachel rolls her eyes.

Rachel then looks up at Agent Fabray, who looked about as stoic as ever. Hazel eyes looked at her, almost as if she knew all of her was something about Agent that intrigued the brunette so and she didn't know why. Now it looks like she'll never get the chance to find out.

"Agent Fabray." She says simply, only receiving a nod in return. Rachel takes the baby carrier and walks out of the bullpen.

When Quinn is sure that the CIA operative has disappeared completely, she walks to the center of the bullpen.

"Puckerman, Lopez front and center. Now."Quinn demands.

The two agents scurry out of their seats and meet their boss in the center. They form a little huddle and Quinn leans in, making sure that only the other two agents can hear her. She didn't need Jesse on her case for what she is about to do.

" I want you on Rachel's ass." Quinn orders the two agents. Santana's face morphs into disgust.

"Ew. Sorry, I don't do hobbits." Santana said.

"She's not really my type, even though my mom would love her." Puck says indifferently.

Quinn gives the two agents a hard glare.

"To _tail _her." Quinn clarifies, annoyed.

"We know that." Puck and Santana say in unison. Signing and choosing to ignore them, the senior agent continues.

" She's been in contact with Brody, it's the only way she could know I hung up on him." Quinn explains.

Santana and Puck look at one another. Puck then looks at the boss, unsure of what to say. Normally, he thought Agent Fabray would be spot on, that her gut was always right. Now, he had his doubts. He felt like the boss may be taking this case too personally and it may be affecting her judgement.

"Oh I don't want you to get pissed." Puck answers, a bit terrified. Quinn raises her eyebrows at him.

"Thought you wanted me pissed?" Quinn answers sharply.

" Oh I don't want you to get pissed..." Puck stumbles out. Quinn's eyes narrow further as her patience for Puckerman became non existent.

" Will you just spit it out Puckerman!" Quinn quietly shouts at him.

"What bozo over there is trying to say" Santana says, pointing at Puck "And as much as it pains me to admit, but what if Berry was right and Brody know you'd trace the call? Maybe he wasn't the sniper?"

Quinn pauses for a moment before answering.

"She was right, Brody wanted me to raid the warehouse. He set me up, and it cost Dani her life." Quinn concludes forcefully.

"Is he a mole or a terrorist?" Puck inquires. Nothing in this case made sense to him anymore. .

" Whatever works to play his game." Quinn says seriously. Truth was, the rogue operative had no loyalties to anyone. They were all pawns playing right into his little chess game.

"What if Rachel leads us to Brody."Puck asks, getting back to the assignment.

" Shadow him and call me." Quinn says as they break away from the huddle.

Puck and Santana go back to their desks, grabbing their bags and other things that they would need for their stakeout. They had a feeling that there was going to be another long, sleepless night ahead of them. What made it worse, is that they had to spend it with each other.

As Quinn walks out of the bullpen, Puck catches her attention.

" So you can bring him in?" Puck asks, clarifying his orders.

Hazel eyes bore into his as a feeling of dread suddenly washes over the junior agent.

"Yeah so I can bring him in." Quinn confirms. She turns around and walks out of the bullpen.

"Into autopsy." Quinn mutters darkly, but it is loud enough for both Santana and Puck to hear her.

The two agents are left standing there, in shock. They knew that it was going to come to this, but for some reason, neither one of them felt right about it. And for the first time in their respective times spent in NCIS, they began to have doubts about their leader and her judgement. They wondered if Quinn's year long obsession was finally beginning to take it's toll on her, now that Dani was doubts stayed with them as they quietly walked into the elevator, making their way to the Embassy hotel.

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**AN: Hm, what is Rachel up to? And I hope you enjoyed this chapter, as much as I enjoyed writing it. From here on out, things are going to get a bit darker and I hope you stick around for the ride. Plan on continuing this story when all of the Brody stuff is out of the way. **

**Anyway, feedback is always welcomed and appreciated. Until next time, have a great week.**


	5. Something's coming

**Disclaimer: Once again, do not own the characters (except Dani) or concept. Just borrowing them for fun.**

* * *

Techno music blasted out of the speakers of the silver laptop, as Sam leans back into Tina's leather chair at her desk. Restlessness began to set in for the shaggy haired agent, after spending all day observing the forensic scientist test the ballistics of all of the rifles that she had in her lab. Sam sees her lay one of the rifles out on the lab table, as she picks up the Brava 51 and opens the chamber. She takes the rifle into the testing room, leaving the bored agent had offered to help her a few times and every time she shot him down. So he sat back in her chair and preoccupied himself with organizing the messy papers on her desk, temporarily feeling like he was contributing a little to the ongoing investigation.

Sam's guilt had been eating away at him all day. There was a part of him that was angry that it was not him that Brody shot when he had the chance. Dani was dead and he was still alive and sitting on his butt while everyone else was trying to find Brody. He felt like he could be doing more than what he is right now. He also knows that if he even thought about leaving his post with Tina, the boss would be down here in two seconds flat to rip him a new one.

But the thing that had been bothering Sam the most is that he had not gone down there to see Dani in the morgue. Agent McKenzie had been the older sister the blond agent had wished that he had when he was growing up in had ribbed him just as much, if not more than Puck and Santana, yet she had always found him later on and reassured him that it was all in good fun.

He remembers the first time he had the opportunity to work a case with Quinn's team and how embarrassed he had been when Dani had caught him looking up her skirt while he was trying to hook up the network computers. The air conditioning had stopped working that morning and the computer techs refused to set up the new system networks under those conditions. He had volunteered to set up Quinn and the rest of the team's computers while he was there. Sam had not counted on Agent McKenzie arriving to work as early as she had.

After she had felt him touch her calf, he remembers how pissed she was with him and how he had a hard time looking at her for the rest of the case without remembering how embarrassed he had been earlier.

Dani had never let him forget that incident and would tease him every once in a while about it. The morning before she was killed, Dani found him looking for his favorite pen that Puck had thrown underneath her desk and she teased him about telling Quinn he was doing it again. Unfortunately for him, Dani had said it loud enough for the boss to hear and ended up on the receiving end of a hazel eyed death glare that left his stomach in knots until they got to the warehouse.

Sam sighs as he sits up in the chair and looks down.

"You were always my sweet superhero, Dani" he said quietly to himself.

Suddenly, a gust of wind blows by the probationary agent, causing him to turn the chair around quickly. Blue eyes widen as he watches the figure before him doing a back flip.

Red boots plant themselves on the ground perfectly as the woman comes out of the backflip and into a somersault. Sam's mouth is opened wide as he gazes in shock and something else taking in the site of Dani in front of palms start to feel sweaty and suddenly the room felt warmer. The woman wore a unitard that was blue and had white stars on the bottom, while the top was red with gold trim. A smirk made it's way to her face as his eyes reached her mischievous green ones. Her hair, which was now black, flowed down to her shoulders as the gold crown shines in the fluorescent lights.

Dani reaches over to her side and grabs the golden rope that Sam had not noticed was there before. She swings the lasso over her head and it falls onto the probationary agent's shoulders. She pulls the tied up agent toward her, as he looks at her nervously. She loosens her end of the lasso and walks towards the helpless agent and wraps it around him.

"You're a naughty boy Sammy." Dani said in a low growl. He finally closes his mouth, taking a loud gulp.

"Oh my God, I'm turning into Puck." Sam says in a high pitched voice. He didn't know what thought disgusted him more, having a sex fantasy about his dead friend or turning into Puck.

"Hehe." Dani giggles, putting her hand on her mouth, as he notices the golden star bracelets for the first time.

Taking his bottom lip into his mouth and biting down on it, secretly willing the most awkward situation he has ever found himself in his twenty-six years of life, Sam finally looks up and notices that she has moved a couple of steps away from him.

" Oh wow." Sam squeaks out after a while.

Tina emerges from the testing area, with the rifle in hand to find a flushed Sam leaving finger nail marks into her chair and eyes widen. She walks over to the lab table and sets the Brava on the tabletop.

"Wow what?" Tina asks curiously.

Sam abruptly turns to her, startling him out of his day dream. He feels around for the golden lasso to find that it was not there.

"Uh-I-Um-I-I" he stutters out, looking anywhere but in her direction.

Tina turns to him, putting her hands on her hips and stares pointedly at him.

" I-Uming Evans, spit out already." Tina said sarcastically.

Sam notices the grip that he has on the chair and loosens it. He stands up out of the chair and clasps his hands together and walks over to where Tina is standing.

"Uh- I- I was thinking about Dani." Sam says softly, looking down again in shame.

Tina' s hard stare softens in understanding. She rubs his shoulder comfortingly.

" Me too." Tina confesses. "I still kinda feel like she's here, you know?"

Tina looks over Sam's shoulder and sees goth Dani mouthing 'I love you' while holding up her hand that had her pointer, pink and thumb out. Tina signs back to her and receives a smile in return as Dani disappears.

Sam looks over and sees Wonder woman Dani wagging her finger in his direction. His lips turn into a lazy lopsided grin.

Noticing the faraway look in his eyes, as the agent continued to stare out into the lab. Tina's eyes widen as she catches onto what Sam is thinking about. She takes her hand and smacks him hard in the back of the head, glaring at him as he flinches.

Sam cluelessly looks at her cluelessly.

"What the hell was that for?" Sam asks as he rubs his head.

Tina walks over to the lab table and picks the Brava up, taking it into the lab.

"If I were you, I would get that dopey look off your face before Fabray gets here. She'll be down here in five minutes." Tina advises as she walks back into the testing room.

At the mention of the boss and how she would kill him for what he was fantasizing about, he scampers into the testing room with Tina.

" The FBI database gave me six weapons, whose rifling patterns fit the bullets you recovered. I've been able to eliminate all but three- two SWAT weapons, the Tango 51 and the Bravo 51. And this.." Tina explains, pointing to each of the guns before pulls out the black bolt sniper rifle and hands it over to a crouching Agent Fabray.

Quinn takes the rifle in her hands and runs her fingers along the thin barrel. She looks it over in recognition.

"My old friend. A Marine M-40 A-3 sniper rifle." Quinn finishes. She remembers having to use this on many occasions during her time as a sharpshooter.

"It looks sweet, the way you own that boss." Sam says proudly, smiling at the boss. His smile drops as hazel eyes send a glare in his direction.

" Sweet?" Quinn asks him, pointedly.

"Uh yeah, it's an expression. Sweet as in-" Sam starts to explain but is cut off by Agent Fabray.

" Yeah, I know what it means Evans." Quinn said pointedly. " Do you think Brody looked "_sweet" _when he shot Dani?"

"Of course not boss." Sam said, shaking his head as Quinn looked as if she were two seconds away from throttling him with the rifle. Noticing this, the forensic scientist decides to step in and save Sam's ass.

" My vote is for the Tango or Bravo 51's." Tina suggests. "What do you think Fabray?"

Quinn looks away from Sam and turns towards Tina, temporarily forgetting her anger at the naïve agent.

" Your test round show more gouging than Brody's." Quinn explains, pointing to the examples in front of her. " He was hand -loading and moly-coating."

"Very good Agent Fabray. You are really good with that." Tina praises, clapping her hands together.

"Moly-coating?" Sam asks.

" Yeah. Molybdenum disulfide." Tina explains as Sam looks at her, seemingly more lost than he had been before. "It's a lubricant. It decreases barrel wear and increases accuracy."

"Evans, run a trace on Tango and Bravo 51 sales in the last six weeks. Tri-State area and check the Bravo first." Quinn orders as she and Sam stand up at the same time.

"On it boss." Sam says, leaving the lab. Tina stands up and walks over to the lab table with the M-40 and places it on the table with the others. She takes a white cleaning cloth out of her lab coat pocket and begins cleaning the barrel of the M-40.

" Any prints on the brass?" Quinn asks as she walks up to the table. Her eyes automatically drawn to the Bravo 51. She picks up the rifle and places her hand on the barrel._It can't be. He's not that good. _

" No." Tina says as she cleans off the barrel. "Why? Is your gut telling you something?"

"Yeah. I need coffee." Quinn deadpans continuing her stare down with the rifle in front of her. _How did he know?_

Tina throws down the cloth and carefully sets the gun down.

" No Fabray. Come on. This isn't just another investigation. Danielle was your agent and your wife. But she was also my friend." Tina says tiredly. " So can you just stop with the John Wayne stare and _tell_ me what your gut says?"

Agent Fabray's grip on the rifle tightens.

" What don't I believe in, Tina?" Quinn asks as she looks into the scope.

" UFO's, mystics, coincidence, saying you're sorry, excuses..." Tina says offhandedly. " I could go on all night."

" As a Marine sniper, I used hand loaded, Lapua .308, boat tail, full metal jacket." Quinn states. She takes her eye out of the scope and turn towards a confused looking Tina. " with moly-coated bullets."

Tina's eyes widen and her jaw drops in shock.

" Fabray." the forensic scientist said solemnly. Quinn sets the Bravo 51 back down on the table.

" Do you know what a sniper calls a Bravo 51?" Quinn asks, putting her hands behind her back, as the pieces of the investigation began to make sense.

" No." Tina said softly. A part of her knew what Agent Fabray was about to say, but she did not want to believe it. She didn't believe that Body would be that cold blooded or ruthless in his misguided revenge quest against Agent Fabray.

" A Kate." Quinn says darkly. Danielle's middle name was Katharine and sometimes her family would refer to her as 'Kate' when she was younger.

A feeling of dread filled both of the occupants in the room, as neither one of them wanted to believe any of this was happening. Any doubts that they might have had as to whether or not Brody was really going after Dani evaporated with that revelation. She really was his target and now they were all next. No one was safe anymore.

Quinn clenches her fists as she feels her anger at the situation grow. She had no clue as to how Brody had access to the information that he might have about her team. But she was damn sure going to find out and make whoever leaked her team's information and make them pay dearly.

* * *

**12:00am**

**Pharmacy, Downtown DC**

A tall, lanky young man with curly brown hair, walks out of the pharmacy with a brown paper bag, as its doors close and the lights go out. He moves his left arm counterclockwise, trying to get the knot out of his shoulder. After a year of physical therapy, his shoulder was finally well enough to be taken out of its sling. More importantly, he was okayed to go back to work as a Assistant medical examiner, this time with the Norfolk county morgue.

As much as Matt enjoyed his tenure at NCIS and working with one of the best medical examiners in DC, his run in with Brody had made him reevaluate his position with the agency. The situation with rouge agent had terrified the assistant medical examiner more than he let on. It wasn't until the first six months of seeing the company therapist that he realized how much the incident impacted him. In the end, he decided that it would be best if he moved on to a more secure work environment and took an open position at the county medical examiner's office in Norfolk. He gave his old medical school friend, Mike Chang, a glowing recommendation to Shelby who hired him immediately.

Matt did not regret his decision to leave NCIS so far. Although he had missed his colleagues at NCIS and planned on visiting them before he headed back to Norfolk, Matt loved his new job at the county morgue. The work was a little less challenging than some of the cases that they encountered at NCIS. He hadn't had the opportunity to help his new boss much with autopsies and was not thrilled to be assigned paperwork until his shoulder had healed. The assistant medical examiner is excited to finally get back to what he did best on Monday and get back to performing autopsies.

Droplets of rain fall on top of his head as Matt feels the tension in his shoulder get worse. He unlocks the door to the blue sedan and gets inside. As he closes the door shut, the medical examiner immediately like felt something was off. He freezes when he hears a clicking noise coming from the backseat. Matt looks down and sees the silver barrel of a pistol pointing in his direction.

"My shoulder hurts when it rains too, Matthew."

Brown eyes widen in horror and grip the steering wheel as Matt realizes the man who was responsible for the night terrors he had been having for the last year. His mind flashes back to that faithful day last year.

"_Tell me, Agent McKenzie, have you ever fired your weapon out of anger?" Brody asks Danielle, as the brunette lying on the silver table as he confiscates her weapon._

_Brody had held and himself hostage for the past five hours. He assumed that no one else in the agency knew what going on and that help would not be on the way any time soon. The rogue operative had demanded Shelby to text Tina, to compare notes on the autopsy of one of his men. _

_Matt and had been surprised to see Agent McKenzie walk into the basement doors instead of the forensic scientist, but dared not show it. Unfortunately, Brody had not bought the facade, apparently recognizing Danielle when they had previously worked together. He pointed the gun in 's direction, threatening to shoot her if Agent McKenzie did not surrender any of the weapons that she had on her._

_As he sat there and watched his colleague helplessly, he had expected Brody to lash out at the agent. Instead, he saw an amused smirk on their kidnapper's face. He focuses his attention back to Agent McKenzie who sits up and rolls her eyes at the rouge operative._

"_No, but I wish that I could right now." Danielle said defiantly. _

_Brody laughs at her for a couple of seconds before turning the gun in his direction and pulled the trigger. The last thing he remembered, before losing consciousness, was screaming in agony as the bullet tore through his right shoulder and blood splattering his light blue scrubs._

Matt is brought back to reality as he feels the cold barrel being pressed up against the back of his head. He was once again another one of Brody's hostages, like he had been a year ago. The nightmare was beginning once again.

* * *

**Autopsy**

It was a few minutes past midnight when the exhausted Dr. Corcoran takes the zipper of the black body bag and begins to zip it up. As she got to the pale face of Agent McKenzie, she smiles softly at the young woman. She had finally finished the autopsy on her dearly departed friend and she was prepared to hand her over to the funeral home. When she had everything she needed to perform the final autopsy for Agent McKenzie, she had used some of the mortuary putty to cover up the bullet wound. Outside of some bruising on her ribs from when the agent had fallen earlier, Danielle was primed and ready to go to the funeral home, looking as stunning as she had been in life.

The medical examiner made a note to herself to talk to the busy agent about what her plans were, if she had any, as to where Danielle's body was going to go.

"Goodnight Dani." she says softly, zipping up the remainder of the bag. She places the bag in one of the silver lockers and closes the door. Just as Shelby is about to turn out the lights and leave, the phone rings.

" Autopsy, Dr. Corcoran speaking." Shelby says formally, pulling out the stool, taking a seat.

"Hello, Dr. Corcoran." Matt says calmly.

The medical examiner smiles. Shelby had not heard from her former assistant since last year, when he formally resigned from NCIS. As tired as she was, the medical examiner also wanted to know how everything was working out for him. She had hoped Shannon, the chief medical examiner in Norfolk, was not being too hard on her young charge.

"Matt! Great to hear from you sweetie, how have you been?" she asks excitedly.

_On the other side of town, the assistant medical examiner takes a deep breath, as Brody presses the barrel of the gun deeper into his head. _

"_I've been better."Matt says hesitantly._

"Oh what's wrong? Is your shoulder bothering you again?" she asks with a frown. Suddenly, she hears a muffled noise coming from Matt's end of the phone.

" _He's having flashbacks." the cold voice on Matt's end of the phone says as he takes the phone away from Matt._

Shelby nearly drops the phone at the sound of the new voice on the phone. _Please let it not be him. Not again._

"Who's this?" Shelby asks cautiously.

"_Oh, I'm hurt. You don't recognize your son in law's voice?" Brody asks playfully. The newly clean shaven agent leans back against the seat and props his feet up against the passenger's seat._

"You bastard! What the hell have you done to Matthew!" Shelby exclaims.

"_You do remember me." Brody says smirking._

"If you hurt Matthew, so help me..." Shelby threatens, standing up from her stool.

"_I have no intention of harming Matthew. I think one ruined shoulder is enough. It certainly is for me." Brody jokes, playfully poking the gun into Matt's affected shoulder, causing him to wince in pain._

" What do you want, Brody?" the medical examiner asks pointedly.

_Brody takes his feet off of the seat and sits up straight, noticing that the doctor was in no mood for his teasing tonight. Then again, the medical examiner could never understand his dark sense of humor. Just like most of the others in his life" Professionally, a courtesy. From one doctor to another."Brody tells her. " Personally, I just wanted to catch up, see how my mother in law is doing-"_

"If you call me that again, you will be begging for Agent Fabray to come after you when I'm through with you." threatens. "I'm not your "mother-in-law" and you need to hurry up and get to your point before my patience runs out."

_The newly shaven Brody is stunned momentarily, before clearing his throat and continuing._

"_I want to prove that I did not kill Danielle." Brody said determined._

The medical examiner had almost allowed herself to laugh at the captor. _Who did Brody think he was trying to fool with his plea of innocence? _She wonders to herself.

" By taking Matthew hostage?" Shelby asks sarcastically.

"_Matthew is free to go if you'll listen to my side of this horrific tragedy." Brody bargains._

Shelby rubs her forehead wasn't sure she should go through with this. He could go back on his deal and kill Matt as soon as she got there, adding another body to her table. Then again, Matt might end up or worse if she does not agree and sets Brody off, he might end up much worse.

"Okay, I'm listening." Shelby agrees, reluctantly.

"_It's a long story and I'd hate to have somebody tracing this call." Brody said. He wouldn't be surprised if Agent Fabray in her paranoia, had all of her team's phones bugged._

Shelby's eyes drift over to the silver locker that contained Agent McKenzie's body.

"Well, no one is here but me a-and Danielle." Shelby confesses solemnly.

"_It must have been a difficult autopsy for you.I am truly sorry Doctor." Brody says, imitating what he had seen as being comforting. The Mossad operative had excelled in every facet of his training except for one. He had a difficult time relating to people and their emotions and expressing empathy. So his father had taught him how to imitate those emotions. It was the only useful thing the old man had ever taught him._

"Oh get on with it!" Shelby said angrily, squeezing the handle of the phone.

"_Will you meet me alone?" he asks, picking up the gun._

" What happens to Matt?" the medical examiner asks.

" _Come alone and you exchange places." Brody answers. Matt grabs the phone out of Brody's hand, after hearing his former boss' deal with his captor. He couldn't stand by in silence any longer._

"_Doctor, don't come! He'll kill you." Matt warns frighteningly. _

_Brody abruptly grabs the phone out of his hands and rubs the gun on the back of his head in warning._

"_Learn to trust, Matthew. I may have shot you in the should, but I've __**never**__ lied to you, have I?" Brody asks, blue eyes glaring at the assistant._

"You have my word." Shelby agrees, prepared to end the conversation.

"_Thank you." Brody says hanging up the phone with a smirk. He leans back against the seat once again, waiting for his guest of honor to arrive. He looks over at Matt, noticing the assistant medical examiner had yet to take his vice grip off of the steering wheel._

"_Relax Matthew. This will all be over soon." Brody tells him as he closes his eyes._

hangs up the phone and rushes over to the coat rack, grabbing her leather jacket. She closes the door, not bothering to lock it and briskly walks over to the elevator doors.

* * *

**Bullpen:**

After her meeting with Tina, Quinn spent the rest of the afternoon at her desk. She had spent the better part of the day driving herself crazy over DC Metro's report on Dani's death. She had read the files from cover to cover, front to back and could nearly recite every detail within them. Unfortunately, none of them would help them answer the questions that have been haunting the senior agent's mind over the last couple of days. What did Brody really want from her? Why had he picked her and the people around her as his targets? And why was Rachel Berry protecting this piece of dirt? What did he have on her?

She slammed the last page of the file down on her desk and covered her eyes. It's possible that her gut had been wrong all along and Berry was right and Brody was innocent? Maybe there was a part of her that wanted to blame the Mossad operative because of what happened last year?

Quinn suddenly drift back to Dani, like they ever really stopped to begin with . She hadn't had the chance to think about what to do for her funeral or what she had wanted. They had talked about it in jest a few times over the years and coming to the conclusion that Quinn was probably going to go before Dani ever would. Just a few nights ago, Dani had brought the subject up again, wanting to talk about it seriously, only to have the senior agent brushed her off and asking her to wait until they wrapped this case.

_Yet another failure to add to the books._

Quinn looks up and sees Dani sitting at her desk this time, with her arms crossed and glaring at her. The red bullet wound was still there, mocking her and reminding her of her shortcomings.

" Re-evaluating your convictions, now?" Dani challenges her. " How many times have you told me that there was no such thing as a coincidence?"

Before Quinn can answer, she feels a hand on her shoulder. She looks up and sees Jesse staring down at her, sympathetically. The senior agent takes his hand and squeezes it as hard as she can, watching as her friend recoiled his hand back quickly. He holds back from screaming in pain and rubs the afflicted hand.

"Quinn, I know this has been a very difficult day for the both of us." Jesse says comfortingly.

_You don't know the half of it ._

"That's what my DI used to say. Never believed him." Quinn jokes. "Are you leaving for your date with CBS?"

"Yes, I am." he says smiling proudly.

Just as he was about to walk away, he feels a tug on his hand. Dull, yet tired hazel eyes stare up at the director. What she was about to do meant breaking one of her own rules, but she desperate. She couldn't let Jesse do that interview and blow all of the progress that she and her team had made on this investigation. Quinn knew that if she could convince him to hold off on the interview for just a few more days, she could have Brody downstairs in the basement.

"Don't do that interview...please?" Quinn begs quietly. Her eyes become watery as unshed tears formed as she silently pleads with her friend to do this for her and for Dani.

A conflicted Jesse looks down at her. The director felt like he should relieve her from this case now before it consumed her. Brody had gotten inside of her head and it was only bound to get worse. But if he takes her off of the case, he had a feeling that she would take matters into her own hands and hunt down the rouge operative alone.

"Fine, I'll see if I can delay it for a few days." Jesse sighs, disappointed.

"Good." Quinn says smiling as she goes back to the papers on her desk. Jesse makes his way to the entrance of the bullpen.

"Goodnight, Quinn." he says.

"Night." Quinn replies, not looking up at him.

As Jesse walks into the entrance of the elevator and lightly bumps into , who was dressed in her beat up leather jacket and black umbrella.

" Shelby! How nice to see you again." Jesse greets warmly, giving her a hug. Shelby briefly returns the hug before turning around and stepping away.

Quinn observes Jesse's conversation with the doctor from her seat. She notices that the normally extroverted Shelby, seemed a bit more subdue and nervous.

" And you, congratulations." says, smiling softly. Preparing to walk away, she is once again stopped by the oblivious director.

"Going home?" Jesse asks her. The medical examiner looks anywhere but in Jesse's direction.

"Um, yes. Something like that." Shelby said nervously, while looking around for any signs of the senior agent.

_She's lying. _Quinn tells herself as she abruptly stands up from her desk and sprints over to the elevator doors. Unfortunately, by the time she gets there the doors shut.

* * *

**12:30 am**

**Downtown D.C.**

The light rain began to come down more heavily as the two men sat in the car in silence. The pain in the assistant medical examiner's shoulder had worsen over the last thirty minutes. He did not know how long he could keep his arms up like this. But he also did not want to make any sudden movements, afraid of provoking his captor.

Brody on the other hand, had become increasingly more bored with sitting with the medical examiner than he had been previously. In the beginning it was fun to watch the man squirm a little. Now he finds his victim to be quite boring. He hadn't said a word since the phone call to Shelby and didn't even attempt to engage him in any sort of conversation. The assistant medical examiner just sat there with a blank stare. Hopefully Shelby will prove to be a more engaging hostage.

"So, are you going back to work, Matthew?" Brody asks causally, breaking the silence. He sets the gun down on the seat next to him, hoping to ease Matthew's mind a bit and loosen him up.

" Monday." Matt tells him, not wanting to give him too much information.

" Good. I've always found that work is the best-" Brody starts to say, but is interrupted when a red and black mini cooper pulls up behind them.

"Ah, a Mini Cooper, how Shelby." Brody says, amused. He picks up the gun and points it into Matthew's ribs.

"Flash your lights."he orders. Matt turns on his high beams and flicks the stick of the car. "Now, roll down your window."

Matt does what he is told and presses the button to open the windows. He waits for it to go all the way down before placing his hands back on the wheel.

They see exit the Mini Cooper and the alarm go off. She approaches the driver's side of the car and knocks on the window.

Brody takes the gun and nudges Matthew out of his seat. "Now, you wait in the good doctor's car while we have a chat."

He sees moving away from the door and he opens it up. The assistant medical examiner stumbles out of the car. He looks at his old boss for the first time in a year, in sympathy and Shelby simply nods in reply. He walks away from the Doctor and heads over to her carAs Doctor Corcoran enters the vehicle slowly, Brody places the small gun that he had used for Matthew into the black duffel bag at his feet and replaces it with the black rifle. He points it towards Dr. Corcoran's direction, making sure that it was in her line of site.

Shelby sits down slowly, noticing the scope of the rifle. Placing her hands on the steering wheel, she closes her eyes, hoping Quinn and the others could figure out where she is soon.

Brody sits up and places his arms on the top of the seat, smirking victoriously at his new hostage.

"Hello Shelby. It's been a while."

* * *

**A/N: Hello again and I hoped you enjoyed this chapter. Sorry it took so long to post, had a bit of writer's block with this one. Next chapter is probably going to be a bit longer, about the same length as the second again for all who are reviewing and following this story, really appreciate it. **

**Trigger warning: In the next chapter (or chapter seven) there will be a reference to suicide. **

**Feedback is always welcomed and thank you again for reading.**


	6. The Good Doctor

**Disclaimer: Do not own the characters (except Dani) or concept. They belong to Ryan Murphy and CBS, respectively. Just borrowing them for fun.**

**A/N 1: There is a reference to suicide in this chapter.**

* * *

Dr. Corcoran's fingers begin to turn white as her vice grip on the steering wheel grows. She closes her eyes, trying as hard as she can not to lose the last bit of composure that she had left, as the screeching sounds of her breaks ring into her ears. She watched helplessly through the mirror of Matthew's car, as the assistant medical examiner struggled to maneuver the Mini Cooper. She had spent many years restoring her nineteen sixty nine red and white Mini Cooper back to the impeccable condition that it once was in its heyday. To watch hopelessly as Matthew Rutherford destroy a part of her hard work in one already disastrous night , as she and her captor look on, was disheartening to say the least.

"Oh for god sakes!" she mutters to herself. Brody raises an eyebrow and shakes his head at her.

"Obviously Matthew has never had an intimate relationship with a standard transmission." Brody brown eyes glare hard in his direction for a moment before turning her attention back to the mirror.

"Use the clutch! God dammit Matt, use the clutch! What part of this is he not understanding?"she shouts at him, and briefly turning to Brody, as she places her head on the steering wheel. "You're stripping my gears."

She painfully watches the compact car jerk forward as the driver his propelled back into his seat, gripping the clutch. Shelby slams her hands against the steering wheel and points at the mirror angrily.

"Unbelievable!" Shelby declares, exasperated.

"The price of growing up in America. You never learn how drive a stick." Brody says amused.

"This is too painful to watch anymore." Brody murmurs a few minutes later, after watching the assistant medical examiner once again fail to maneuver the car. He picks up his duffel bag and places the Brava inside of it. Shelby had all but given up watching her young ward destroy her breaks system. So she placed her head on the steering wheel, hoping Brody would do something to put them both out of their misery.

"Matthew is free to leave anytime he wants to. In his own vehicle of course." He says causally, as he discreetly exits the sedan. Shelby looks in the mirror and waits for Brody to get in the car, before she following his lead and exiting the car, slowly.

She closes the door of the blue sedan and watches as Matt cautiously walks up to her.

"You shouldn't have come here doctor." Matt says softly. The medical examiner pats her old assistant on his good shoulder.

"I couldn't let that bastard put a bullet in your good shoulder, or else you'd never go back to work." she says jokingly. " Do you have a cell phone?"

" Brody took it." Matt replies.

"Keep walking Matthew and don't stop." Shelby orders him. "I'll open the window and lean out of it and that will be your cue to drive away as fast as you can."

"Dr. Corcoran..." Matt begins uncertainly. He didn't feel comfortable leaving her alone with a killer. He was tempted to head back to the cooper and asking Brody to take him as well. He thought they would have a better chance of getting out of this situation alive, if he took the both of them.

"Go straight to NCIS. Tell Agent Fabray everything that has happened." Shelby interrupts, giving him a look that said this was not up for discussion. He reluctantly nods and walks away from him. He makes his way toward the blue sedan, without looking back.

Shelby reaches the door of her Mini Cooper and opens the driver side. When she gets inside of the car, she notices Brody patiently waiting for her with the sniper rifle pointing in her direction. This time, because of the limited space within the car, she can feel the warm steel of the barrel poking into her side. She takes the key in her hand and turns the ignition of the car and hears the engine roar to life. The doctor then reaches down and manually rolls down the window and leans her head out of for a moment. She watches as the blue sedan speed away down the street before putting her head back in the car.

* * *

**12:45 am**

**Bullpen**

"_Hello, you have reached Corcoran. I am currently unavailable at the moment. Please leave a message after the tone and I will get back with you as soon as possible. Thank you."_

"Damn it!" Quinn screams into the speaker as she slams one of her hands on the end of the desk. "When I said no one leaves the building, it wasn't a suggestion!" The special agent in charge runs her hands through her short mane as she stands up and starts pacing in front of her rushes over to Quinn's black office phone that was currently on speaker.

"Shelby, please pick up the phone, we're all worried about you-" the forensic scientist says worriedly, but is cut off by her furious boss.

"No one includes _you _Dr. Corcoran!" Quinn yells authoritatively as she briefly pushes Tina away from the phone. The senior agent's face was beat red and for a moment, Tina swore she could see steam coming out of her ears. She puts her hand on Agent Fabray's arm and pushes her back off to the side.

" We're all worried, _including_ Quinn. Or else she wouldn't be yelling and screaming into your voicemail like a manic." Tina apologizes while glaring pointedly at the senior agent, trying to diffuse the situation. She hangs up the phone and turns around facing her pouting boss. She had stopped pacing and was now sitting back in her chair, glaring down at the paperwork on her desk.

"Look Quinn, it's not Shelby fault okay?" the forensic scientist tries to reason while cautiously putting her hand on her shoulder. " She's spent all day, working on Dani's autopsy, most likely on autopilot and drove herself home in the same way."

Hazel eyes soften as she sighs heavily in defeat, knowing Tina had a point. Shelby had to spend all day prepping Dani's body for the funeral home and maybe it was too much for her to take. She knew that she couldn't do what Shelby had to do all day. The few minutes that she had spent observing Shelby, drove her crazy. She couldn't imagine being anywhere near her right mind working on the fallen agent's autopsy.

Before voice her agreement with Tina, Sam taps his hand onto his desk and looks over to them, hoping to get their attention.

"Boss! An outside call came into Autopsy twenty three minutes ago. I'm tracing the number right now." Sam says urgently, as he typed frantically into his silver desktop. Agent Fabray abruptly gets out of her chair and runs over to Sam's desk, hunching over his shoulder as they watch the computer run the trace.

A ping comes from the computer a few seconds later as the trace comes to an end. The two agents eyes widen in surprise at the name that appears on the screen.

"Boss, the call came from Matthew Rutherford's cell phone." Sam says.

"Oh yeah, I almost forgot about him." Tina adds, sitting on top of Quinn's desk with her legs crossed.

"The guy's been in rehab for the last year." Sam points out turning to Tina.

"Maybe he heard about Dani and was trying to reach out to Shelby." the goth suggest optimistically.

Quinn walks away from Sam's desk and slumps back down into her chair once again, shaking her head in the negative. Outside of Dani's sister and three brothers, the only people who knew about Dani's death were the people within NCIS and Metro police. Both agencies had come to an agreement to keep her death and the details behind it under wraps until NCIS could complete a through investigation.

"So, they're in a pub somewhere downtown consoling each other?" Sam questions, causing Quinn to look up at him skeptically.

"Yes." the forensic scientist says as she hops off of the desk.

"I don't like it." the senior agent says, opening up the drawer to find her gun. She pulls out her gun and places it on her desk as she lets the drawer slam shut.

"Why not?" Sam and Tina say in unison, looking at their boss as lost as ever as they watch their friend stomp away from them.

"I don't need a reason why!" the special agent shouts at them, before sitting back down and grabbing her office phone. She didn't care if she had to fill up Shelby's whole damn inbox before the medical examiner finally answered her. She wanted to completely confirm that her friend was safe and sound at home.

Sam and Tina watched helplessly

* * *

**Downtown D.C.**

"This is a nice ride you've gotten for yourself Doctor." Brody complements.

"A little too small for my taste, but perfect for you. Did you buy this in such pristine condition?" He asks as his calloused hands examined the smooth, black leather interior.

Since Matthew's escape and Brody's vague directions for her to drive god knows where, Shelby had remained quiet throughout their drive. There were so many questions that the medical examiner had for her captor about the situation they were all currently in. All she wanted to do was find out why the he was doing all of this. Was this a part of his cover in Hamas or was it something else entirely? And what had Quinn done to him that he would go after everyone that she held dear, including herself. Most importantly, the medical examiner wanted to find out if Brody truly was the triggerman in Danielle's murder or had it been one of his henchmen, whose bodies were currently rotting in her fridge? The medical examiner had decided that she was going to play his game for now, hoping for a bit of quid pro quo in return from the rogue assassin.

"God no. The car was a wreck when my neighbor left it to me after he original leather interior was falling apart. The framing had begun the rusting process and it needed a new paint job. And the engine was completely shot, so it took a while to find all of the parts for that." the medical examiner explains as she moves the clutch.

"Fascinating. Who did the restoration?" Brody asks, crossing his left leg over his knee.

Shelby looks directly into the mirror, coming face to face with the rogue agent for the first time in while. She noticed that outside of a couple of frown lines,he had not changed much since the last time she saw him lat year. Although, there were a few dark circles under his eyes and he seemed a bit paler than she could remember. _Lack of sleep, seems someone has a guilty conscience._

" I did." Shelby answers challengingly.

The rogue agent throws his head back laughing as the doctor tries to fight the urge to reach into her glove compartment and use the extra dissection kit that she kept on her passenger prematurely.

"Of course you did." he replies once he regains his composure.

"Do you doubt me?" Shelby asks annoyed.

"Never Doctor." he says, toying with the seam on his pants leg. "I was just thinking of the irony, that hands so skilled at dissecting the dead are also capable of restoring life. At least to a machine, anyway."

"What do you want Brody?" the medical examiner asks darkly.

"A test drive and maybe some good conversation, if that's not too much to ask of you doctor." He says causally.

The chorus of proud mary rings out throughout the car, breaking the tension. Brody takes the phone out of his pockets and sees the name 'NCIS' flashing onto the screen.

" Hm, now who would be calling Matthew from NCIS at this late of an hour?" he asks, already knowing the answer. "Oh well. Matthew is to arrive there shortly anyway. Pull over here, Doctor."

Shelby parallel parks the car into a nearby park, wondering what he wanted to do here.

He was tempted to answer it, but if the special agent in charge is as predictable as he thinks she is, then she would have the call traced. He wasn't ready for their little game of hide and seek to end just yet.

Brody rolls down the window and tosses the cellphone out into the grass. He holds out his hand to Shelby.

"Your phone, Doctor. It's only fair."

The medical examiner reaches over into her purse and pulls out her white Iphone. She reluctantly drops the phone into his hand and watches as he tosses it out of the window in the same way he had Matt's phone. _Well that's out as evidence. _She thinks wearily to herself.

"Now buckle up, Doctor. It's a dangerous night, at least it will be for you." Brody says ominously as he grins at the medical examiner deviously, as she pulls away from the curb and back onto the road.

* * *

**Bullpen:**

_Please record your message after the tone_

Sam hangs up the phone as carefully as possible, feeling uncomfortable with the eyes currently boring holes into him. He had a feeling that she wasn't going to like what he is about to say and may resort to throwing things, specifically towards him.

"I-I'm getting voicemail." Sam stutters out nervously, waiting for his boss' reaction. To his surprise, Agent Fabray only glares in his direction while tapping her pen onto the desk.

"Like I said, they are at the pub. They probably can't hear their phones because of the noise." Tina reasons, standing up from Puck's desk.

"Do you want me to leave a message?" Sam asks carefully turning back to Quinn. The senior agent stares at him a moment longer before putting the pen in her hand down.

"No. Get a GPS fix." Quinn orders.

When she notices that he is not working fast enough, the senior agent snaps her fingers in his direction. "Snap it up Evans!"

" One second boss." Sam says holding his hand up and not looking up at her waiting for something to come up. " Got it. Georgetown. Olive and Twenty-ninth."

_What the hell is Shelby doing in Georgetown at this time of night._ Quinn wonders to herself.

" Maybe Matt lives there." Tina offers as she feels any sort of optimism that she may have had about Shelby's whereabouts slowly start to fade away.

" That's a negative. It says that his current address is somewhere up in Norfolk and his old place is located on Peabody." Sam tells her.

" So they're-they're parked. They are probably talking." the forensic scientist stutters out, desperately trying to reassure herself.

Quinn stands up, with her gun in hand, and makes her way out of the bullpen, having heard enough to know that Shelby was in trouble. Sam looks into his drawer for his gun, preparing to be his boss' back up. He would be lying if he were to say that his ulterior motive wasn't to stop Quinn from doing something that will get her fired or worse.

"Do you want me to go with you, boss." Sam asks. Quinn turns to him, shaking her head.

"No, Puck and Santana are out. Stay here and watch Tina." the senior agent orders as she walks away.

"For nobody leaving the building, there sure are a lot of people leaving the building." Tina deadpans as she plops back down in Puck's chair while Sam rubs his temples, feeling a headache coming on. If this case was getting to the others as much as it was getting to him, he would not be surprised if there was no team left when all was said and done.

**Downtown D.C.**

"How are they?" Brody asks causally.

His attempts at getting any sort of reaction out of her had failed so far and the little patience that he possessed was suddenly dwindling. Shelby was understandably not making any of this easy on him and he wanted to even the playing field a bit by getting personal. Brody wanted to make sure that the good doctor would deliver his little message to Agent 'd hope that maybe she'll be smart enough to back off long enough to give him enough time to finalize his deal.

The medical examiner pulls the clutch a little too hard to the right, causing the car to jerk to the side. She briefly looked into the mirror, regaining her composure and then looking back out into the road.

"I haven't the slightest idea as to what you are talking about. Care to enlighten me?"

Brody shakes his head at her and laughs. He shoves the barrel into her side and places his finger on the trigger, as a reminder of who was in charge. He wasn't going to let the doctor control his game by evading his questions.

"Beth and Rachel. How are they?" He clarifies calmly. "I'm sure the move to DC from New York was a bit of an adjustment for the both of them."

Blood rushed through the medical examiner's ears as she turns around looks back at her captor stunned. There were only three people in Rachel's life that knew she was moving from New York City to DC, her father Leroy, Rachel's boss at the CIA, David Martinez, and herself. All of them knew of Rachel's precarious situation with Brody and had promised to keep this information to themselves until the liaison officially began her tenure at NCIS. Rachel had been concerned about Beth's safety and wanted to keep Brody away from them at all costs. At least that's what she had assumed when her daughter called her one night to talk about their move.

Although Brody had been a talented and clever operative, Rachel was leaps and bounds ahead of him.

If she wanted information to be kept under the radar, she will do everything in her power to make sure that it stays under the radar. How Brody could have known about Rachel and Beth's whereabouts perplexed her.

She inhales deeply and turns back around, narrowing her eyes at her smug passenger.

"How do you know that, Mr. Weston?" she asks in a low growl. She feels her jaw clench and the hand that is on the clutch nearly break the black plastic top.

A melodious laugh ringing out into the car, fueling her anger more as her foot presses down harder onto the pedal. The laughter soon fades and she watches as he readjusts himself in the seat, putting both hands behind his head.

"A little songbird told me." Brody replies. _I've finally gotten you where I want you, Doctor. _He watches as her shoulder's sag slightly and her defiant gaze fade as she takes in this new information.

"In fact, she may or may not have told me a lot about your co workers and their colorful pasts. Agent Fabray's in particular." Brody finishes, sitting up.

_Oh Rachel, what the hell have you done? _Shelby thinks trying to keep her emotions in didn't believe him and the only thing stopping her from throttling him at the moment was the black Brava situated between them. She knew that Rachel would never risk her career or being separated from Beth for Brody. _He has to be following her and Beth the same way that he'd followed the rest of the team. He had to be._

"Really? So, you used that information to murder Agent McKenzie yesterday, am I correct?" Shelby challenges angrily.

Brody leans forward with his hands clasps, looking Shelby in the eyes earnestly.

"No, I didn't kill Agent McKenzie. She was a dear old friend of mine and I would have never hurt her, in spite of what you may think." he said sincerely. " I do hope that you, Agent Fabray and the rest of your team find her killer."

The car stops at the light and Shelby uses the moment to analyze him. She looks into his blue eyes and they appear to be tired and yet sincere. For a moment she wanted to believe his story and begrudgingly go back to NCIS and tell Agent Fabray the news. But then she sees something else there, that seemed cold and calculating. That this was all a performance for her benefit and he was playing part well. As the light turns green and they take off once more, any thoughts that the medical examiner might have exonerated him faded away.

Noticing the flicker of doubt cross the medical examiner's eyes, Brody takes the Brava and puts it down on the floor. He leans over the armrest and places his arm on the back of the passenger's seat. Shelby looks at him incredulously.

"An act of good faith. I was never going to hurt you doctor, I would never dream of hurting a fellow physician." he said.

_Imagine that, the first honest thing he's said all night. Is hell freezing over?_

* * *

**Downtown D.C.**

" Okay, where are they now Sam?" Quinn said into the black headset.

The dark blue Dodge charger zips around the corner, barely missing the lamppost, as Agent Fabray approaches Olive street. She had broken numerous traffic laws and nearly skidded in the heavy rain on the slick wet roads to get here. The agent was lucky that the roads were clear and the cars that were on the road were smart enough to move out of her way.

" _Same place, Boss. Olive and twenty-ninth." _ she hears Sam tell her.

Shortly after, Quinn pulls up to twenty-ninth sign and pulls up to the curb. She rushes to put the car in park and takes her seatbelt off. The special agent hops out of the car and slams the doors of the charger, not bothering to put the alarm on.

She runs out into the park, frantically searching for any signs that Brody and Shelby could be near by. When her search comes up empty, Quinn presses the headset into her ear further.

"Sam, get a fix on my cell!" Quinn shouts, making sure that the probie could hear her through the sounds of the rain.

"_Okay, you're right on top of them."_

_No they weren't_, Quinn thinks frustrated as she continues to pace around the area.

"Damn it Sam! They're not here!" Quinn yells at him after a while.

" _They have to be, boss." _ Sam says as desperate as she feels about now.

She closes her eyes, feeling the walls begin to close in all around her. She grabs pieces of her now wet hair, clawing into her scalp. Quinn barely registers rustling of the phone being passed over as Tina comes to the phone.

"_Quinn, is there a pub nearby?"_

"No! There is no _pub_! There is no _people_! There are no _cars_!" Quinn snaps as looks around the empty park and her arms flail into the air.

"_Okay, I was just checking." _She hears a thump and assumes that Tina is done talking to her for now. She wanted to feel bad about yelling at the forensic scientist, who was only trying to help, but frankly she was too exhausted to care about her feelings right now. The special agent couldn't even control her own emotions at the moment. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, pushing down the tight feeling in her chest.

"How accurate is this fix, Evans?" she asks as calmly as possible.

"_It's within twenty-five meters."_

Quinn's short nails dig into her hand as she looks down defeated. She's exhausted all of her options and she just didn't know what to do anymore. For all the special agent knew, Shelby could be dead right now and Brody's dumped her body somewhere far across town. Once again, someone else was going to die for her and it was only going to continue until there was no one left.

" It's gonna happen again, isn't it?" a voice tells her softly. Quinn looks up startled, seeing Dani once again. This time, she wore her dark blue NCIS jacket and the white pants she was in the day she died. Unfortunately the little red albatross of the agent's overwhelming guilt and failure still remained on her forehead.

"Shelby's going to take a bullet for you." Dani finishes ominously as she walks up to the senior agent.

"He wouldn't kill Shelby." Quinn tries reassuring herself.

Green eyes widen and stare at her incredulously as she gets closer to the blond. She chuckles at her wife darkly, not knowing if Quinn's unusual optimism refreshing or naive.

" Why not? Because you couldn't live with the guilt? Maybe Brody knows that." Dani finishes as she finds herself a couple of inches away from Quinn. She takes a moment and brushes back some of the senior agent's wet hair behind her ear. She leans into the agent's ear, getting as close as she possibly can.

Quinn gulps as she feels her pulse beating faster at the loss of space. The last time she had been this close to her, close to anybody really, was a few days ago and the feeling was beginning to overwhelm her. She closes her eyes and allows herself to indulge in the fantasy a bit longer, knowing that when she opens her eyes, Dani would be gone once again. She desperately needed that connection with her again, no matter how fleeting that connection may have been.

"Maybe that's his plan."Dani whispers into her ear, stroking her hair a bit. She takes the blond agent's right hand into her own and places it on her stomach, as Quinn watches it graze the area where their child would have been.

"Maybe the only way to save Shelby, Tina and Evans, to end this little game-" she pauses, taking her wife's hand off of her stomach and placing it on her holster, where her Sig sat comfortably on her hip. "is to kill yourself."

Hazel eyes open wide and abruptly as she steps away from the woman, noticing that she had left her once again. The agent looks down to see her hand still glued to the holster of the Sig. There was only one other time that Quinn could recall, where she felt as low and as desperate as she does now. For a moment, she thinks that Dani may be right and it terrifies her. As long as she was alive, Brody would continue to go after the people she has come to care about. It wouldn't be long before Jesse, Puck and Santana became targets as well. Maybe sacrificing herself would be a service to her team and stop Brody from shedding more of the blood of the only family she had left in the world now.

Trying not to dwell on those dark thoughts much longer, Quinn pulls out her cellphone. An idea comes to her as she scrawls down her contacts list, looking for 's number and calling her phone when she finds it. The senior agent hears "Defying Gravity" playing faintly nearby one of the bushes and rushes over to it. She gets down on one knee and sees a familiar white Iphone on top of a black cellphone. The agent feels some of the heavy weight on her shoulders lessen and for a moment, she's able to breathe once takes the phones and notices that there is a bit of superficial water damage from the rain. _Nothing that a good hair dryer and Evans couldn't fix. Speaking of which..._

"Special Agent Evans. Found Shelby and Matt's cellphones in the park." the blond agent says, almost wanting to say triumphantly. _Now all I need to do is find Shelby._

"_Why would they leave their cellphones in the park?" _a clueless Sam asks her.

" They wouldn't Evans!" Quinn said frustrated, as she walks away from the bush and back to the Charger.

" _Do you want me to come down there?" _

Quinn approaches her car and turns off the alarm, She climbs into the driver's seat, dropping the phones into her black cup holder.

" If I wanted you to come down here, I would've told you so." she says, putting the keys into the ignition and starting the engine. " Put a BOLO out on Shelby's Cooper and pull her license plate from her file."

She hears Tina in the background, begging for Sam to give her the phone, before snatching it out of his hands.

"_Quinn. Brody has Shelby and Matt." Tina tells her frantically._

"They're not dead, T." Quinn tell her with a soft smile of relief. She pulls away from the curb and heads back onto the main road.

"_How do you know?" Tina asks her softly._

"Because..." the agent pauses for a second, trying to word this as sensitively as possible. " Brody dumped their phones in the park, not their bodies."

She hears the phone drop and a bit of commotion in the background. After a few minutes she hears someone pick up the phone once again.

"_Uh Boss, Matt's here" Sam tells her. Sam hands off the phone to a soaking wet Matt._

" How'd you get away?" Quinn asks, relieved that there was one less person she had to worry about, but still concerned about the status of the medical examiner.

" _I didn't. Brody let me go."_

* * *

**2:00 am**

**The Embassy hotel**

Agent Lopez turned to her partner with her arms crossed over herself and a thin black eyebrow raised as she watched her partner twitch. He crossed and uncrossed his legs with his hands in between him. After having to watch him gluttonously down a double big gulp, she felt agent Puckerman deserved the torture that he was currently experiencing.

She had told him several times on the ride over not to get it knowing that there was a chance that Rachel may want to take a dip in the pool, but he ignored each of her warnings and proceeded to drink the large sodas out of spite. The mohawked agent began to twist and turn as soon as they exited the car and the feeling only got worse as they followed Rachel and Beth to the hotel's natatorium. As far as the brunette agent was concerned, Puck had this coming.

"C'mon Lopez, just let me go for two seconds and I'll be back out here. Please." Puck pleads, looking like he was on the verge of crying. He didn't know how long he would be able to last and Lopez refused to let him keep any spare clothes in her car while they were on stakeouts.

She rolls her eyes at him and focused her eyes back onto the natatorium doors. "Fabray told us to stay on Berry's ass, so we're staying on Berry's ass." She uncrosses her arms and put her hands on her hips and grins.

"Maybe next time you'll remember this moment and not drink your weight in sugar with two double big gulps." she says.

An evil grin forms on her face as she figures out a way to make her co worker's suffering worse. She presses her face up against the glass, pretending to look at the pool water.

" Hey Puckerman, the water in pool sure looks really nice from here." Santana said, turning back towards him. " It looks so warm and clear. And I think I can see a water fall coming from one of the jacuzzis. Do you want take a look and tell me if it is or not?"

Not being able to take it anymore, Agent Puckerman stomps away from the natatorium door.

"Screw you Lopez. I'll be right back." he said childishly as he finds himself tripping over the rug, before awkwardly jogging away. Santana put her hand on her mouth, trying not to laugh out loud.

Usually, Agent Lopez hated doing stakeouts with Agent Puckerman. He acted like a twelve year old boy and would constantly find a way to make anything and everything that they were assigned to do vulgar. But tonight, she was thankful and dare she say, happy for the antics of her co worker. He was successfully able to take her mind off of the events and turmoil of the last two days. For the first time in the last forty-eight hours, the latina had been hopeful that she was finally getting back to her old self yet again.

Santana picks at the sleeve of her leather jacker, before turning back to the natatorium windows, searching for their target. They had spent the better part of the day closely tailing Berry's taxi. The two agents followed her to a rental car place, where the brunette rented a white Prius. Santana rolled her eyes at the rental. Then, they followed her and her child into a suburban neighborhood, which Puck pointed out was Agent Fabray and Dani's neighborhood. They sat out in the driveway of one of the her neighbors for most of the day. Two people had dropped by the house for a visit, a pale, well dressed man brunette man who walked hand in hand with a black, curly haired man, who Santana assumed was his partner. They were wearing blue and orange skinny jeans that looked tighter than the pair she had at home. They only stayed for a few minutes before they left Berry's.

Around midnight, Santana watched tiredly as Rachel with a sleeping Beth in her arms, locks up the house and gets into the Prius. She was on her phone at the time, having what Santana assumed to be an angry conversation. Berry's shrill voice was enough to bring Santana out of her daze. She then punched a drooling Puck, startling him awake, and they proceeded to follow the white Prius to a seven-eleven, where Puck whined until the brunette agent relented to let him go get his big gulp. In spite of the distraction, they left at the same time as Berry and followed her back to the hotel. She and Puck were going to follow her to back to the natatorium, with the latina hoping that the Mossad operative would slip up and reveal something about Brody's location. Which unfortunately for her, didn't happen.

Instead, she had to listen to her partner whine and complain about having to go to the bathroom, while Santana refused him every she had to keep a close eye Berry while she splashed around with her mini me. If the junior agent were being honest, she was ready to call the Boss and tell her that this stakeout was a bust.

" Why don't you visualize her naked, Lopez." A voice said, breaking Santana out of her thoughts. She turns on the heels of her boots startled for a moment. When she sees who the voice belongs to, the junior agent feels her jaw drop down to the floor.

There was Danielle McKenzie, her old partner and only friend, looking better than she had two days prior. Her raven hair was parted in two perfect pigtails and she was wearing a white blouse that showed off her tanned four pack. She also wore a plaid skirt so short that it would put her old Catholic high school skirts to shame. Dani topped the outfit off with knee high white socks and black , as her hand casually points to the scene inside.

Regaining her composure, Santana peaks inside to where Dani is pointing at. She sees a tanned and toned Rachel, in a black one piece with the sides cut out, place Beth, who was wearing a pink bathing suit with yellow ducks on it and orange water wings, into the chair. She kisses the girl on the head, before walking over to the small, white diving board. Berry then bends over, as Santana watches her arm muscles flex, and dives into the water.

"Don't tell me she intimidates you, Lopez?" Dani asks teasing as the junior agent grunts at her.

" Please. There hasn't been a woman born who could intimidate Santana Lopez." Santana said cockily.

Dani lips form into a smirk at her overly confident partner. She bends down and pulls a red lollipop out of her left knee high and takes the wrapper off.

"You're forgetting Mama Lopez." Dani says in a matter of fact way, sticking the sucker into her mouth.

"Mothers don't count." Santana counters stubbornly, turning to face Dani.

Smirking, Dani moves her tongue around the lollipop . "What about that lawyer, Maria?"

"Divorce attorney. Worse than mothers, fyi." the junior agent snarks, crossing her arms over herself.

"Well, Rachel's not your mother." Dani said " She's not a divorce lawyer. She definitely intimidates you." The raven haired woman concludes, continuing to suck on her candy.

"Does not." Santana argues, glaring at her friend. Ghost or not, she was not going to let Dani win this round, even if she did have a junior agent had heard how hardcore Mossad operatives could be, from some of her friends from the other agencies had told her. If Berry were anyone else, she might have been more intimidated than she had been. But this was a woman, who from what she saw of her wardrobe today, wears animal sweaters and plaid that made the agent want to puke rainbows. As far as Santana was concerned, she had nothing to worry about when it came to the munchkin.

"Does too." Dani counter, sticking her tongue out, that was now bright red.

"Does not." the junior agent presses on, as her agitation grows. Dani gives her a sweet smile, hwile nodding her head.

"Does too." she whispers.

"Does not!" Santana shouts, while stomping her foot a little.

"Whoa, Lopez, chill out, do you want Jew babe to hear you or what?" Puckerman asks, watching his partner argue with air. After relieving himself in the bathroom, he stood behind one of the corners, watching his partner argue with air.

Santana covers her mouth too embarrassed to say anything else.

"Who the hell were you talking to anyway?" he asks curiously.

"None of your damn business Puckerman." Santana said defensively. "If you want to do something useful, keep your damn eyes on the munchkin clan."

Before he could say anything to defend himself, a gorgeous, tall ,tanned brunette with light brown hair in a white robe with the Embassy insignia. She was also wearing a gold star of David, like the one Rachel had on this morning._Interesting._ Santana notes to herself.

"She must be a Mossad officer too." Santana whispers to Puck, pointing the Star out to Puck, who only nods at his partner.

She walks in front of them and comes to a halt.

"Excuse me, may I?" she asks pleasantly. Santana and Puck step aside at the same time and nod, smiling at her.

"You certainly may." they say together in unison, sending one another a glare in return. The woman smiles politely at them and steps inside of the natatorium. Puck and Santana watch the woman take off her robe, revealing a lavender swim one piece underneath. She walks over to the sitting area, where Rachel is currently hunched over, tickling a giggling Beth. The woman walks up to Rachel and stops. She looks down at the twosome and smiles.

They watch as the two women exchange pleasantries and the woman complimenting Beth. When the little girl starts to yawn, they watch as Rachel excuses herself, while the little girl places her head on her mothers neck. The woman in lavender walks away from them and over towards the diving boards.

Santana watches closely as Rachel cover the sleepy two year old in a towel, before putting her fluffy white robe on . She notices Berry begin to play with something in her pockets. _Well, well, well, just what are we hiding, Berry. _

Rachel walks towards them and they begin to back away from the door. But before they do, Santana sees the CIA liaison look around before taking the robe that she had on off and taking the woman in lavender's robe. They watch as Rachel goes into to the opposite door of the natatorium and leaves.

" Did you see that Puckerman? I knew that smurf was up to no good." Santana said excitedly as Puck looks on in disbelief.

He could have sworn Rachel was cool and sort of harmless. He didn't believe that she would help out that tool who killed Dani. But after seeing that, he wasn't so sure anymore. But he wasn't going to admit that Lopez had been right for once, just yet, so the agent decided to give Berry the chance to explain herself before he passed judgement.

"Now we got to find a way to get into that robe." Puck says.

Santana scrunches her eyebrows together in thought and an idea immediately pops up into her mind.

"Listen Puckerman, you'll distract the Mossad officer, while I go investigate her robe." the junior agent tells him. He looks at her skeptically.

"And how would suggest I do that, babe?" Puck asks rubbing his mohawk.

Santana glares at him pointedly, while watching the Mossad officer climb out of the pool and head for the changing rooms.

"I'm that pervy little mind of yours can hold her attention for a few seconds Puck, you always do."

A few minutes go by before Puck and Santana make their move. Santana stays at the far side entrance, where the officer left her robe, while Puck casually paced back and forth near the changing rooms. It took fifteen minutes for the Mossad officer to appear once again. She is wearing a white gown with matching white sandals. Puck pulls out his camera phone and begins taking pictures of the area. He then walks past the officer, purposefully takes a couple of pictures of her. She looks up and notices the mohawked man taking pictures of her and stands up.

"What do you think you're doing?" she asks angrily.

Puck looks around, signaling his partner on the other end subtlety, before turning his attention back to the woman in front of him.

"Umm, I'm going for a swim." he says nervously. The woman's posture relaxes somewhat and she points him in the direction of the locker room.

"There's a locker room back there."

Santana walks over to the robe, making sure that the woman couldn't see her. She takes her phone out of her leather pocket and begins taking photos of the robe.

" I'm fine." Puck insists, hoping that Santana hurries up.

The woman looks at him curiously tilting her head. "Where's your swimsuit?"

Santana reaches inside of the smurf's robe pocket, pulling out a passport and about four thousand dollars in euros. She takes quick pictures of the Euros, before slipping them back into the pockets. The junior agent then opens up the passport.

There is a black and white picture of Brody smiling. But the name on the passport was not alias on his passport is Jean Rene Trousseau.

_Berry, you are so screwed. Just wait until the Boss finds out._ Santana smiles as she takes multiple pictures of the passport. She places it back into the robe and quietly walks away from the chair.

* * *

**A/N 2: Hello again. Sorry for wait, have been very busy as of late and I haven't had much time to do much writing. If nothing else comes up, I should have the next chapter done in a week or so. Hope you enjoyed this chapter as much as I enjoyed writing it for you lovely people. Than you so much for the reviews, favorites and likes, it really means a lot to me. I would also like to apologize if anyone felt triggered by the reference of suicide in this chapter. Feedback always welcomed.**

**So until next time...**


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